APP
PLAYER INFORMATION
Grace // melancholise
I also play Karolina Dean and Koriand'r.
On RP: I'm easygoing and perfectly fine with slowtagging and even dropping threads -- sometimes RL's a bitch, and I know how that feels. If you have to drop a thread, just let me know and we can handwave the ending so at least we know what happened and can reference it in our respective characters' CR rather than leave it hanging! :D
------------------------------
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Cassandra Cain
CODENAME: "Batgirl"; there's no AU equivalent of the Batfamily, but it can be attributed to her shadowy powers.
SERIES/SOURCE: DC Comics
AGE: Seventeen
GENDER: Female
ROLE: Student
------------------------------
------------------------------
BACKGROUND:
Look back: seventeen years ago, the city of Detriot. Renowned assassin David Cain and martial arts master Lady Shiva meet as members of the city's league of assassins. After a brief flirtation, Cain manipulates Shiva into bearing him a child - a child he is determined to mold into the perfect assassin. A weapon for his use.
This child, of course, was Cassandra Cain. She never knew her mother; her father deprived her of speech and human contact through her early years. He brought her up mute, never teaching her a word of spoken or written language. Instead he trained her in the language of the body: how to read stance, pose, the slightest twitch of muscle. The parts of her brain normally used for speech were trained so she could read other people's movements and body language and predict, with uncanny accuracy, their next moves.
He trained her in martial arts. He trained her reflexes. He pushed her to places no one would push a child - keeping her in solitary confinement, forcing her to dodge bullets, making her perform exercises for hours on end. The only childhood games she played were those like her father's versions of "two for flinching", where he made her take a bullet in the leg and punished her with another shot if she flinched. Cassandra Cain knew no other life. She grew up mute, strong, flexible, tough. Dangerous.
When she was eight, Cain decided to try out his living weapon. He brought her on one of his missions and ordered her to kill a mob boss in front of him. She was a child with no concept of death and she thought it was just a game. She obeyed.
Picture the next moment in slow motion: little Cass, poised with her hands on the corpse's throat, her child's dress stained with blood. Watch the eight-year-old's eyes widen. Watch her realise what she has done. These few seconds will stay with Cass for the rest of her life. She describes what she saw when she read her victim's body language as, "Terror, and then...nothing." An absence of movement, of consciousness, of vitality. Of life.
Brought up with no contact with the outside world, Cass nevertheless realises the implicit value of a life - a life that she, an unaware child, has destroyed. She turns and flees blindly, away from Cain and everything he has molded her into.
Cain searches for her in vain. Despite the abuse he has put her through, he does, in a twisted way, care for her. She's gone, though.
She spends the next few years on the streets, surviving...and then some. At the age of thirteen, Cass, horrified by the death that the streets around her are filled with, turns herself into a vigilante. She makes use of her abilities and devotes herself to preserving life. She stops suicidal people, prevents murders, saves kidnapped children, fights off gangs of muggers. Born a warrior, she makes herself a hero. It is an almost obsessive calling for her, partly motivated by her intense guilt over the murder she committed at her father's behest. She's a small girl, not even fifteen, and several times she comes close to death, but her childhood training always miraculously saves her. And she never kills a single opponent.
Always, she keeps a lookout for Cain. Like many children who escape abuse, she hates him yet perversely views him as the only caretaker she has ever had, no matter what he forced her to do. Still, she will never consent to be treated his weapon again. She is a damaged girl, but a strong one; a survivor.
At the age of fifteen, her powers begin to manifest, with unprecedented and often uncontrollable results. She can step into shadows and find herself suddenly in dangerous positions halfway across the city, and this element of unpredictability, coupled with her inability to learn to use the power on her own, is a great source of frustration and anxiety for her. Right after an unfortunate incident where she loses control and ends up in the murky depths of the city's sewers, a helpful stranger finds her. He says he is a teacher from a school for people like her - "mutants", he says, and it's only later on that she understands the meaning of the word - and offers her a place in it. The thin, violent street urchin is suspicious, but when she reads him she realises that he is sincere and genuinely concerned. After being assured that she can continue saving lives in her new capacity as a student at the Institute, she allows herself to be cleaned up and shipped off to the school.
------------------------------
PERSONALITY:
Cass is intensely quiet. She doesn't speak much -- she can't. Her vocabulary is limited and she often ends up speaking in disjointed, one- or two- sentences and using gestures and body language and sometimes even drawings if she needs to convey anything else. Her inability to communicate normally is, naturally, a great hindrance to any social interactions she might have.
Though she may sometimes lack a comprehension of social norms or the way the world and the school system works, Cass isn't stupid - her understanding of the world is merely one quite different from everyone else's. When she thinks, it is not in words: a telepath who peeks inside her mind may not get thoughts per se, but instead get a whirl of emotions, images, sensations, the hint of a gesture. Her ability to read body language affords her a unique understanding of what people mean, rather than what they say. This comes with a cost, however: in a world built by and for those who communicate verbally and textually, she's at a disadvantage. She can barely read.
For someone with as dark a history as hers, Cass places a surprisingly high premium on ideals. She values protecting the weak and innocent, bringing down those who abuse their power, and both justice and doing what is right, which are not always the same thing. Wrt school behaviour, she is not a rebel, but she measures every rule against her inner system of moral values and will not hesitate to break them if they impede her actions. Cass is not much given to philosophizing over morality: she prefers to act according to what she knows is right, with an unshakeable, almost childlike conviction that it is right.
Above all else, Cass values human life. She will not kill. For the one murder she committed as a child, she has never forgiven herself, to the extent that she has something of a death wish - she feels that to make up for her wrongdoing, she has to give her own life in exchange. Her guilt, which often manifests in nightmares, self-destructive behaviour and a seeming lack of a sense of self-preservation, drives her to obsessively atone for that single act, no matter the cost. For Cass, life, all life, is sacred. Except her own. She weighs and measures her own life by that ideal - and finds it lacking.
------------------------------
APPEARANCE:
Five foot five, black hair cut raggedly and just long enough to gather up in a bun. She is relatively small-built, lean and wiry from living on the streets. Serious brown eyes. Light skin due to the Asian blood she inherited from her mother. Could pass for normal except for the way she moves - every line in her body is tense and controlled, her movements deliberate. Her body language says that she is constantly on the alert and ready to fight, or flee.
She dresses practically: dark or plain tops, loose pants that don't hinder movement. Her mutant power has no obvious physical manifestation, but when she is in shadow she seems to slide out from under your eye and become hard to focus on, sometimes disappearing into it entirely.
------------------------------
POWERS:
Something of a cross between shadow manipulation and teleportation. (Shadowporting, maybe.) She can travel between shadows - step into darkness, and end up in another shadow five or fifty feet away. Numbers being merely an example; the exact limit of herabilities is as yet unknown but she can't port, say, halfway across the world. A mile or so is definitely within her range, though. Basically, she teleports from place to place with darkness as a sort of gateway for her abilities. Her affinity for shadows also lends her some measure of stealth where she can seem to fade into them and conceal herself.
(Power somewhat inspired by the creatures called the Myrddraal in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. If pedants want to know.)
[Note: She is skilled in martial arts, a highly trained assassin and her enhanced strength, agility, stamina and reflexes enable her to carry out incredible physical feats. Her tolerance for pain is so high that she can take a bullet without flinching and continue fighting when injured. In addition, she has a superhuman ability to read body language perfectly, to the point where she can predict and react to an opponent's moves almost instantaneously in a fight. She has described it as like a dance, where she knows all the movements, where time seems to flow together and she just knows, somehow, what will happen next. These aren't supernatural powers, however; they have been trained into her since she was a child. (See History).]
------------------------------
NOTES:
The way I think of this AU!Cass is that she's kind of a cross between canon!Cass during No Man's Land and canon!Cass under Oracle's mentorship. That leaves plenty of wiggle room for her to grow, become more heroic, learn how to interact with others.
------------------------------
Grace // melancholise
I also play Karolina Dean and Koriand'r.
On RP: I'm easygoing and perfectly fine with slowtagging and even dropping threads -- sometimes RL's a bitch, and I know how that feels. If you have to drop a thread, just let me know and we can handwave the ending so at least we know what happened and can reference it in our respective characters' CR rather than leave it hanging! :D
------------------------------
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Cassandra Cain
CODENAME: "Batgirl"; there's no AU equivalent of the Batfamily, but it can be attributed to her shadowy powers.
SERIES/SOURCE: DC Comics
AGE: Seventeen
GENDER: Female
ROLE: Student
------------------------------
------------------------------
BACKGROUND:
Look back: seventeen years ago, the city of Detriot. Renowned assassin David Cain and martial arts master Lady Shiva meet as members of the city's league of assassins. After a brief flirtation, Cain manipulates Shiva into bearing him a child - a child he is determined to mold into the perfect assassin. A weapon for his use.
This child, of course, was Cassandra Cain. She never knew her mother; her father deprived her of speech and human contact through her early years. He brought her up mute, never teaching her a word of spoken or written language. Instead he trained her in the language of the body: how to read stance, pose, the slightest twitch of muscle. The parts of her brain normally used for speech were trained so she could read other people's movements and body language and predict, with uncanny accuracy, their next moves.
He trained her in martial arts. He trained her reflexes. He pushed her to places no one would push a child - keeping her in solitary confinement, forcing her to dodge bullets, making her perform exercises for hours on end. The only childhood games she played were those like her father's versions of "two for flinching", where he made her take a bullet in the leg and punished her with another shot if she flinched. Cassandra Cain knew no other life. She grew up mute, strong, flexible, tough. Dangerous.
When she was eight, Cain decided to try out his living weapon. He brought her on one of his missions and ordered her to kill a mob boss in front of him. She was a child with no concept of death and she thought it was just a game. She obeyed.
Picture the next moment in slow motion: little Cass, poised with her hands on the corpse's throat, her child's dress stained with blood. Watch the eight-year-old's eyes widen. Watch her realise what she has done. These few seconds will stay with Cass for the rest of her life. She describes what she saw when she read her victim's body language as, "Terror, and then...nothing." An absence of movement, of consciousness, of vitality. Of life.
Brought up with no contact with the outside world, Cass nevertheless realises the implicit value of a life - a life that she, an unaware child, has destroyed. She turns and flees blindly, away from Cain and everything he has molded her into.
Cain searches for her in vain. Despite the abuse he has put her through, he does, in a twisted way, care for her. She's gone, though.
She spends the next few years on the streets, surviving...and then some. At the age of thirteen, Cass, horrified by the death that the streets around her are filled with, turns herself into a vigilante. She makes use of her abilities and devotes herself to preserving life. She stops suicidal people, prevents murders, saves kidnapped children, fights off gangs of muggers. Born a warrior, she makes herself a hero. It is an almost obsessive calling for her, partly motivated by her intense guilt over the murder she committed at her father's behest. She's a small girl, not even fifteen, and several times she comes close to death, but her childhood training always miraculously saves her. And she never kills a single opponent.
Always, she keeps a lookout for Cain. Like many children who escape abuse, she hates him yet perversely views him as the only caretaker she has ever had, no matter what he forced her to do. Still, she will never consent to be treated his weapon again. She is a damaged girl, but a strong one; a survivor.
At the age of fifteen, her powers begin to manifest, with unprecedented and often uncontrollable results. She can step into shadows and find herself suddenly in dangerous positions halfway across the city, and this element of unpredictability, coupled with her inability to learn to use the power on her own, is a great source of frustration and anxiety for her. Right after an unfortunate incident where she loses control and ends up in the murky depths of the city's sewers, a helpful stranger finds her. He says he is a teacher from a school for people like her - "mutants", he says, and it's only later on that she understands the meaning of the word - and offers her a place in it. The thin, violent street urchin is suspicious, but when she reads him she realises that he is sincere and genuinely concerned. After being assured that she can continue saving lives in her new capacity as a student at the Institute, she allows herself to be cleaned up and shipped off to the school.
------------------------------
PERSONALITY:
Cass is intensely quiet. She doesn't speak much -- she can't. Her vocabulary is limited and she often ends up speaking in disjointed, one- or two- sentences and using gestures and body language and sometimes even drawings if she needs to convey anything else. Her inability to communicate normally is, naturally, a great hindrance to any social interactions she might have.
Though she may sometimes lack a comprehension of social norms or the way the world and the school system works, Cass isn't stupid - her understanding of the world is merely one quite different from everyone else's. When she thinks, it is not in words: a telepath who peeks inside her mind may not get thoughts per se, but instead get a whirl of emotions, images, sensations, the hint of a gesture. Her ability to read body language affords her a unique understanding of what people mean, rather than what they say. This comes with a cost, however: in a world built by and for those who communicate verbally and textually, she's at a disadvantage. She can barely read.
For someone with as dark a history as hers, Cass places a surprisingly high premium on ideals. She values protecting the weak and innocent, bringing down those who abuse their power, and both justice and doing what is right, which are not always the same thing. Wrt school behaviour, she is not a rebel, but she measures every rule against her inner system of moral values and will not hesitate to break them if they impede her actions. Cass is not much given to philosophizing over morality: she prefers to act according to what she knows is right, with an unshakeable, almost childlike conviction that it is right.
Above all else, Cass values human life. She will not kill. For the one murder she committed as a child, she has never forgiven herself, to the extent that she has something of a death wish - she feels that to make up for her wrongdoing, she has to give her own life in exchange. Her guilt, which often manifests in nightmares, self-destructive behaviour and a seeming lack of a sense of self-preservation, drives her to obsessively atone for that single act, no matter the cost. For Cass, life, all life, is sacred. Except her own. She weighs and measures her own life by that ideal - and finds it lacking.
------------------------------
APPEARANCE:
Five foot five, black hair cut raggedly and just long enough to gather up in a bun. She is relatively small-built, lean and wiry from living on the streets. Serious brown eyes. Light skin due to the Asian blood she inherited from her mother. Could pass for normal except for the way she moves - every line in her body is tense and controlled, her movements deliberate. Her body language says that she is constantly on the alert and ready to fight, or flee.
She dresses practically: dark or plain tops, loose pants that don't hinder movement. Her mutant power has no obvious physical manifestation, but when she is in shadow she seems to slide out from under your eye and become hard to focus on, sometimes disappearing into it entirely.
------------------------------
POWERS:
Something of a cross between shadow manipulation and teleportation. (Shadowporting, maybe.) She can travel between shadows - step into darkness, and end up in another shadow five or fifty feet away. Numbers being merely an example; the exact limit of herabilities is as yet unknown but she can't port, say, halfway across the world. A mile or so is definitely within her range, though. Basically, she teleports from place to place with darkness as a sort of gateway for her abilities. Her affinity for shadows also lends her some measure of stealth where she can seem to fade into them and conceal herself.
(Power somewhat inspired by the creatures called the Myrddraal in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. If pedants want to know.)
[Note: She is skilled in martial arts, a highly trained assassin and her enhanced strength, agility, stamina and reflexes enable her to carry out incredible physical feats. Her tolerance for pain is so high that she can take a bullet without flinching and continue fighting when injured. In addition, she has a superhuman ability to read body language perfectly, to the point where she can predict and react to an opponent's moves almost instantaneously in a fight. She has described it as like a dance, where she knows all the movements, where time seems to flow together and she just knows, somehow, what will happen next. These aren't supernatural powers, however; they have been trained into her since she was a child. (See History).]
------------------------------
NOTES:
The way I think of this AU!Cass is that she's kind of a cross between canon!Cass during No Man's Land and canon!Cass under Oracle's mentorship. That leaves plenty of wiggle room for her to grow, become more heroic, learn how to interact with others.
------------------------------