posthuman application
Character Name: Timothy Jackson Drake Wayne
Canon source: DC Comics
PB: Ethan Peck
Personality: Though often serious, Tim's sense of humor is subtly perverse, not so much in the perverted sense as in the desire to oppose and contradict. It is difficult to say whether Tim is obedient or rebellious; it might be better instead to say that he is very obedient until given reason to be rebellious. The relationship between Batman and Robin is different from Owlman and Talon. In normal continuity, you will see that Tim as Robin has a great deal of autonomy and operates independently throughout the city as well as with Batman. On Earth 3, Talon may appear to work on his own, but in fact is wearing a communicator through Owlman directs his actions. Talon is expected to obey, and Tim was well trained for this facility. However, his innate need to rebel manifested in his secret dating of Owlman's arch-nemesis' daughter, Duela Dent. It was at least partly a sincere attraction as well, but to date Duela was an insanely dangerous move, absolutely reckless and quite possibly fatal. An ordinarily calm, logical, reasonable young man, Tim had to have known it was borderline suicide. But he did it anyway.
Rebelliousness aside, Tim was taken from his family at fourteen and spent about the next three years working and training closely with Owlman. He is still dependent on Owlman for his sense of identity and purpose in life, and he still instinctively looks for Owlman's guidance when he's about to embark on something big. This feeds into his tendency to overthink things, which keeps him on the sidelines suffering from inaction until the most opportune time to strike has passed. Without a leader, someone to listen to and follow, Tim is lost. He may appear to know what he's doing and he may appear to be fine, but he isn't. This is the situation he eventually gets into with Duela and jumping universes.
Tim is industrious, intelligent, responsible (except when it comes to dating), and mature. Like canon!Tim, he is a geek, though he played Paranoia instead of D&D. Also like canon!Tim, he is a bit hapless when it comes to girls; they are almost always the ones who express their interest first, and then he responds, like a doof. The two main points where he differs from canon!Tim is leadership and lying. Leadership, as mentioned above, can be difficult for Talon!Tim, if he himself is without an overarching guidance from Owlman. As for lying, canon!Tim once remarked: "I lie to Batman," and he did it because Batman can be bizarre and neurotic sometimes, making lying necessary. Talon!Tim, on the other hand, lied as a "fuck you" to Owlman in response to that incredible pressure to be an obedient puppet. Canon!Tim hated having to lie to his father about being Robin, while Talon!Tim sees lying as a simple necessity in the world he grew up in. One last nuance of difference lies in their attitude and general day-to-day demeanor. Both canon!Tim and Talon!Tim are mild-mannered, friendly, good-humored, and attentive, all of which aren't exactly fake but are not necessarily a good representation of his personality. With Talon!Tim, these qualities are more likely to be a front, while with canon!Tim, there may be some genuine feeling behind them. Talon!Tim is actually more ill-tempered than canon!Tim on the inside, though they act the same on the outside.
History: This history is cobbled together from "The Search for Ray Palmer: Crime Society" and speculation. Timothy Jackson Drake was born the only child of Jack "Rat Eyes" (I'm serious, that was his name) and Janet Drake. They were a well off, relatively happy family, if not an especially close knit one. Though he was supposedly kept in the dark about his father's criminal activities by his parents, he was a smart kid who figured out a lot more than he let on. From early on, he was a serious eavesdropper and household spy, learning about Jack Drake's dealings with Owlman and Lucius Fox. He was always encouraged to be competitive and sneaky, the latter of which he became in spades. A good student and proficient hacker, Tim began helping his dad with his work when he was twelve, mostly keeping finances straight. Jack Drake, however, was not a good businessman, and his practices began to attract Owlman's notice in a bad way. Bad investments, expensive trips - Tim helped his father cover up some of these mistakes, but Owlman not only eventually noticed them, he noticed the person who was doing the covering up. When Tim was fourteen, Owlman had Ultraman kill Jack, saying that in addition to new territory and other advantages, he stood to gain one extra prize: Jack's son. (http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1139/846038230_584d7e518b_o.jpg)
Tim had been chosen to become the next Talon. It was not a matter of choice on his part. The previous two Talons were already dead and Owlman felt it was time for another. Accordingly, he adopted Tim, an action that was far more easily accomplished in the corrupt world of Earth 3 than it would have been under regular circumstances. Why he felt the need to take on a teenaged partner at all is unclear, though in fact his reasons may not have been much different from Batman's: Talon is a younger reflection of himself (all the Talons have had black hair and blue eyes like Owlman), a moldable student that, in a much darker sense than the Batman-Robin relationship, becomes a weapon, an extension of his grasp.
But Tim was different from the two before him. Owlman had picked him for his intelligence, and Talon, at seventeen, used that intelligence to date Owlman's arch-nemesis' daughter on the sly. It's not certain whether he and Duela were really planning on getting married or if he had just been humoring Duela, but he agreed to "meet" her family, all of whom of course he already knew due to their long history of fighting. This ended in disaster as Owlman had finally figured out what was going on and the Crime Society had followed them to the Riddler family's hideout. EVERYONE DIED. Okay, just Eddie died.
As it turns out, there was something strange about Duela, much stranger than her emotional instability - she could somehow travel between universes, which was why she was always so confused about who her father was ("Joker's daughter" instead of "Jokester's Daughter"). (http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o112/anotherthessalian/sometimes.png) She decided to travel again, and this time, Talon went with her. They are shown trying out for the Titans (Talon remarks of Osiris, "That kid would get his ass kicked on my world.") and One Year Later, it is shown that they were members. For a while. They were kicked out when their previous affiliation became known, after which Duela is shown turning to crime before being killed by a Monitor. It is canonically unknown what happened to Talon or where he is now; in my speculative headcanon, he has been kicking around lost and lonely, staying far, far away from Gotham.
How does your AU differ from canon? Though there are many different versions of it, Earth 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-Three) is in all its iterations a universe of imperfect inversion where superheroes are supervillains and vice versa. The version described draws heavily on its depiction in Countdown and in Grant Morrison's 1999 antimatter universe. Instead of the Justice League there is the Crime Society, run by Ultraman (Superman, who isn't all that sharp), Owlman (Batman being even more of a douche than usual), and Superwoman (a bitchy mix of Lois Lane and Wonder Woman), with other members such as Power Ring (Green Lantern, whose ring is cursed) and Johnny Quick (Flash, who uses a drug to make him fast). They are opposed by the Jokester (the 'st' is important) and the Riddler family, consisting of Eddie, Eve ("Three Faces of Eve" = Two-Face), and Duela Dent, the Joke(ste)r's daughter, as well as Lex Luthor, who is president. Not everyone has a perfect analogue, and not everybody who was a cape in normal continuity is a cape on Earth 3 (for example, Harley is just a manager). There are also cases where people's moral alignment is ambiguous, which means their counterpart is merely ambiguous as well (though they may lean in different directions), as in Deathstroke's unnamed (SPOILER: IT'S DEADPOOL) doppelganger.
Strengths: intelligent, hard working, experienced combatant, all sorts of assorted skills (lock-picking, hacking, firearms, driving various vehicles, stealth)
Weaknesses: physically weak in comparison to a fully grown man, cocky, overthinks things, co-dependent, neurotic
Preferred drop-in point: after his last appearance; current continuity, more or less
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? I would like to hook Tim up to a leader type and have him play a ridiculously overqualified intern/second-in-command to help work on solutions (most likely for the management/caretaking/integration of ported in people rather than how to go back, as that's... pretty beyond him). I would also like to bounce him off a normal Tim or Batfamily.
First Person Journal Sample: It's sad, but for a second, I thought I might have finally made it home.
No such luck. Or no such misfortune. However you want to look at it.
I'll tell you one thing, though. I'm not about to get shuffled off to some hostel and forgotten about - no, not forgotten about. Hidden away. Chipped and filed and shelved. Things have to change. As if it's not enough that there's nobody in this godforsaken universe capable of understanding the machines that pulled us in, they won't - they can't - tell us about what happened two years ago. And we're all paying for some other person's actions. Look, I might be young, but I'm perfectly capable of working hard, and I have a lot of experience dealing with bureaucracies. Why shouldn't we organize and protect each other's rights, or at least help each other out? Hopefully until such a time that the machines can be turned off or, better yet, used to send us back to where we should be; indefinitely, if we have to. They're not going to listen to a seventeen year old, though. So we need someone older and responsible-seeming for this. We all have something to contribute if we just think about it. So think about it, please. We're never going to be able to fully integrate with the people of this world, so we shouldn't waste energy trying.
Thanks for your time,
T. Drake
Third Person Sample: "That's sufficient," Owlman says through the communicator in his ear, voice perfectly uninterrupted by the wet crunch of teeth under Tim's fist. Tim kicks the man over and, looking at him in assessment, laconically flicks a spatter line of blood off his glove and onto the man's face. There's barely a flinch; he had stopped fighting Tim about three minutes ago, but that isn't always enough to drive the lesson home. The silence of the men around him confirms Owlman's direction.
"Congratulations, David," Tim says to the nearest with a smile, pausing to test his bruised lip with the tip of his tongue. "Boss says you're the best man for the job. Thinks you'll do much better than Mr. Bradley here - I really hope so."
"Yeah. Will do." David mumbles, shoulders stiff. Tim can tell he would have preferred if Owlman had deigned to do this himself, but then, that's the message Bruce wanted to send.
Tim keeps his smile exactly the same even though nobody's looking at him. "Great. Be seeing you, David. Everyone."
He walks out of the warehouse. Nobody shoots him, not even a little. Owlman is silent. Silence is approval. It's only his first week out on the job but he knows that much. And this is all, this everything is about gaining approval. He's told himself as much over and over, through each grueling training session, through all the tests and the blindfolded obstacle courses and being shot at and poisoned and trained some more, that he has to have Owlman's approval. If he wants to survive, he needs this. He has to be better than the Tim who kept silent while Jack Drake drained his accounts with bad investments and expensive trips. He didn't ask for it, but it's who he is now. Talon. He can taste it on the tip of his tongue, and it's sharp, warmly metallic. Dad, he thinks helplessly, careful not to cry - the tears will get trapped behind the lenses of his mask - dad -
This isn't over.
Canon source: DC Comics
PB: Ethan Peck
Personality: Though often serious, Tim's sense of humor is subtly perverse, not so much in the perverted sense as in the desire to oppose and contradict. It is difficult to say whether Tim is obedient or rebellious; it might be better instead to say that he is very obedient until given reason to be rebellious. The relationship between Batman and Robin is different from Owlman and Talon. In normal continuity, you will see that Tim as Robin has a great deal of autonomy and operates independently throughout the city as well as with Batman. On Earth 3, Talon may appear to work on his own, but in fact is wearing a communicator through Owlman directs his actions. Talon is expected to obey, and Tim was well trained for this facility. However, his innate need to rebel manifested in his secret dating of Owlman's arch-nemesis' daughter, Duela Dent. It was at least partly a sincere attraction as well, but to date Duela was an insanely dangerous move, absolutely reckless and quite possibly fatal. An ordinarily calm, logical, reasonable young man, Tim had to have known it was borderline suicide. But he did it anyway.
Rebelliousness aside, Tim was taken from his family at fourteen and spent about the next three years working and training closely with Owlman. He is still dependent on Owlman for his sense of identity and purpose in life, and he still instinctively looks for Owlman's guidance when he's about to embark on something big. This feeds into his tendency to overthink things, which keeps him on the sidelines suffering from inaction until the most opportune time to strike has passed. Without a leader, someone to listen to and follow, Tim is lost. He may appear to know what he's doing and he may appear to be fine, but he isn't. This is the situation he eventually gets into with Duela and jumping universes.
Tim is industrious, intelligent, responsible (except when it comes to dating), and mature. Like canon!Tim, he is a geek, though he played Paranoia instead of D&D. Also like canon!Tim, he is a bit hapless when it comes to girls; they are almost always the ones who express their interest first, and then he responds, like a doof. The two main points where he differs from canon!Tim is leadership and lying. Leadership, as mentioned above, can be difficult for Talon!Tim, if he himself is without an overarching guidance from Owlman. As for lying, canon!Tim once remarked: "I lie to Batman," and he did it because Batman can be bizarre and neurotic sometimes, making lying necessary. Talon!Tim, on the other hand, lied as a "fuck you" to Owlman in response to that incredible pressure to be an obedient puppet. Canon!Tim hated having to lie to his father about being Robin, while Talon!Tim sees lying as a simple necessity in the world he grew up in. One last nuance of difference lies in their attitude and general day-to-day demeanor. Both canon!Tim and Talon!Tim are mild-mannered, friendly, good-humored, and attentive, all of which aren't exactly fake but are not necessarily a good representation of his personality. With Talon!Tim, these qualities are more likely to be a front, while with canon!Tim, there may be some genuine feeling behind them. Talon!Tim is actually more ill-tempered than canon!Tim on the inside, though they act the same on the outside.
History: This history is cobbled together from "The Search for Ray Palmer: Crime Society" and speculation. Timothy Jackson Drake was born the only child of Jack "Rat Eyes" (I'm serious, that was his name) and Janet Drake. They were a well off, relatively happy family, if not an especially close knit one. Though he was supposedly kept in the dark about his father's criminal activities by his parents, he was a smart kid who figured out a lot more than he let on. From early on, he was a serious eavesdropper and household spy, learning about Jack Drake's dealings with Owlman and Lucius Fox. He was always encouraged to be competitive and sneaky, the latter of which he became in spades. A good student and proficient hacker, Tim began helping his dad with his work when he was twelve, mostly keeping finances straight. Jack Drake, however, was not a good businessman, and his practices began to attract Owlman's notice in a bad way. Bad investments, expensive trips - Tim helped his father cover up some of these mistakes, but Owlman not only eventually noticed them, he noticed the person who was doing the covering up. When Tim was fourteen, Owlman had Ultraman kill Jack, saying that in addition to new territory and other advantages, he stood to gain one extra prize: Jack's son. (http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1139/846038230_584d7e518b_o.jpg)
Tim had been chosen to become the next Talon. It was not a matter of choice on his part. The previous two Talons were already dead and Owlman felt it was time for another. Accordingly, he adopted Tim, an action that was far more easily accomplished in the corrupt world of Earth 3 than it would have been under regular circumstances. Why he felt the need to take on a teenaged partner at all is unclear, though in fact his reasons may not have been much different from Batman's: Talon is a younger reflection of himself (all the Talons have had black hair and blue eyes like Owlman), a moldable student that, in a much darker sense than the Batman-Robin relationship, becomes a weapon, an extension of his grasp.
But Tim was different from the two before him. Owlman had picked him for his intelligence, and Talon, at seventeen, used that intelligence to date Owlman's arch-nemesis' daughter on the sly. It's not certain whether he and Duela were really planning on getting married or if he had just been humoring Duela, but he agreed to "meet" her family, all of whom of course he already knew due to their long history of fighting. This ended in disaster as Owlman had finally figured out what was going on and the Crime Society had followed them to the Riddler family's hideout. EVERYONE DIED. Okay, just Eddie died.
As it turns out, there was something strange about Duela, much stranger than her emotional instability - she could somehow travel between universes, which was why she was always so confused about who her father was ("Joker's daughter" instead of "Jokester's Daughter"). (http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o112/anotherthessalian/sometimes.png) She decided to travel again, and this time, Talon went with her. They are shown trying out for the Titans (Talon remarks of Osiris, "That kid would get his ass kicked on my world.") and One Year Later, it is shown that they were members. For a while. They were kicked out when their previous affiliation became known, after which Duela is shown turning to crime before being killed by a Monitor. It is canonically unknown what happened to Talon or where he is now; in my speculative headcanon, he has been kicking around lost and lonely, staying far, far away from Gotham.
How does your AU differ from canon? Though there are many different versions of it, Earth 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-Three) is in all its iterations a universe of imperfect inversion where superheroes are supervillains and vice versa. The version described draws heavily on its depiction in Countdown and in Grant Morrison's 1999 antimatter universe. Instead of the Justice League there is the Crime Society, run by Ultraman (Superman, who isn't all that sharp), Owlman (Batman being even more of a douche than usual), and Superwoman (a bitchy mix of Lois Lane and Wonder Woman), with other members such as Power Ring (Green Lantern, whose ring is cursed) and Johnny Quick (Flash, who uses a drug to make him fast). They are opposed by the Jokester (the 'st' is important) and the Riddler family, consisting of Eddie, Eve ("Three Faces of Eve" = Two-Face), and Duela Dent, the Joke(ste)r's daughter, as well as Lex Luthor, who is president. Not everyone has a perfect analogue, and not everybody who was a cape in normal continuity is a cape on Earth 3 (for example, Harley is just a manager). There are also cases where people's moral alignment is ambiguous, which means their counterpart is merely ambiguous as well (though they may lean in different directions), as in Deathstroke's unnamed (SPOILER: IT'S DEADPOOL) doppelganger.
Strengths: intelligent, hard working, experienced combatant, all sorts of assorted skills (lock-picking, hacking, firearms, driving various vehicles, stealth)
Weaknesses: physically weak in comparison to a fully grown man, cocky, overthinks things, co-dependent, neurotic
Preferred drop-in point: after his last appearance; current continuity, more or less
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? I would like to hook Tim up to a leader type and have him play a ridiculously overqualified intern/second-in-command to help work on solutions (most likely for the management/caretaking/integration of ported in people rather than how to go back, as that's... pretty beyond him). I would also like to bounce him off a normal Tim or Batfamily.
First Person Journal Sample: It's sad, but for a second, I thought I might have finally made it home.
No such luck. Or no such misfortune. However you want to look at it.
I'll tell you one thing, though. I'm not about to get shuffled off to some hostel and forgotten about - no, not forgotten about. Hidden away. Chipped and filed and shelved. Things have to change. As if it's not enough that there's nobody in this godforsaken universe capable of understanding the machines that pulled us in, they won't - they can't - tell us about what happened two years ago. And we're all paying for some other person's actions. Look, I might be young, but I'm perfectly capable of working hard, and I have a lot of experience dealing with bureaucracies. Why shouldn't we organize and protect each other's rights, or at least help each other out? Hopefully until such a time that the machines can be turned off or, better yet, used to send us back to where we should be; indefinitely, if we have to. They're not going to listen to a seventeen year old, though. So we need someone older and responsible-seeming for this. We all have something to contribute if we just think about it. So think about it, please. We're never going to be able to fully integrate with the people of this world, so we shouldn't waste energy trying.
Thanks for your time,
T. Drake
Third Person Sample: "That's sufficient," Owlman says through the communicator in his ear, voice perfectly uninterrupted by the wet crunch of teeth under Tim's fist. Tim kicks the man over and, looking at him in assessment, laconically flicks a spatter line of blood off his glove and onto the man's face. There's barely a flinch; he had stopped fighting Tim about three minutes ago, but that isn't always enough to drive the lesson home. The silence of the men around him confirms Owlman's direction.
"Congratulations, David," Tim says to the nearest with a smile, pausing to test his bruised lip with the tip of his tongue. "Boss says you're the best man for the job. Thinks you'll do much better than Mr. Bradley here - I really hope so."
"Yeah. Will do." David mumbles, shoulders stiff. Tim can tell he would have preferred if Owlman had deigned to do this himself, but then, that's the message Bruce wanted to send.
Tim keeps his smile exactly the same even though nobody's looking at him. "Great. Be seeing you, David. Everyone."
He walks out of the warehouse. Nobody shoots him, not even a little. Owlman is silent. Silence is approval. It's only his first week out on the job but he knows that much. And this is all, this everything is about gaining approval. He's told himself as much over and over, through each grueling training session, through all the tests and the blindfolded obstacle courses and being shot at and poisoned and trained some more, that he has to have Owlman's approval. If he wants to survive, he needs this. He has to be better than the Tim who kept silent while Jack Drake drained his accounts with bad investments and expensive trips. He didn't ask for it, but it's who he is now. Talon. He can taste it on the tip of his tongue, and it's sharp, warmly metallic. Dad, he thinks helplessly, careful not to cry - the tears will get trapped behind the lenses of his mask - dad -
This isn't over.