deerington app

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IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Alex Rider
Canon: Alex Rider
Canon Point: Post Crocodile Tears

In-Game Tattoo Placement: A small, singular antler behind his left ear.
Current Health/Status: Burns along his chest and shoulders. A fractured ankle. Underweight.
Age: 14
Species: Human

History: "Most schoolboys dream of being spies. With Alex, we have a spy who dreams of being a schoolboy."

Personality:

Alex Rider is very much a product of the traumas that wrought him.

He starts the series a polite, soft spoken and personable child with a level of curiosity that simply cannot be tamed and the ingrained skills (brought on from being literally trained for spy work from birth by his uncle) to do something about it-- a kid that trusts adults to have his best interests at heart, and even find this whole spy business a little bit exciting sometimes.

Alex enters Deerington at the end of Crocodile Tears a boy ready to distrust every adult he meets with even the slightest measure of power at their fingers, petty enough to embarrass those adults publicly for little more than that, and an instinctual habit of resorting to fire and explosions to resolve his feelings of fear and anger.

Because there's no denying that at the point Alex is coming from, he is angry. It's an anger born of learned helplessness, from his complete loss of autonomy since his uncle died nearly a year ago. He's been manipulated and abused by just about every adult authority figure he's come across in that time, particularly by the supposed "good guys" working at MI6, even gas-lighted into asking these people for help to get out of situations that they orchestrated in the first place. He's been drugged, tortured, dehumanized, and forced to kill in his own defense on countless occasions. And while he always proves to have the perfect macabre joke for every situation ready on his tongue, they're never delivered with any measure of enjoyment. Simply resignation.

Because while Alex likes to claim at the end of every mission that this is the last time, the simple fact of the matter is that he's just too good at it to quit. And not just because Ian raised him to master all of the requisite skills as a child, though that certainly helps.

There's that pesky little curiosity that got him into this whole mess in the first place, for one. He just can't seem to be able to take people at their word if even the tiniest part of their story sounds off, and won't rest until he uncovers the truth for himself. In Eagle Strike, he literally undertakes his own mission without any explicit support or encouragement from MI6 simply because when he brings his suspicions about Damian Crane to them they choose to dismiss him. In Scorpia, he joins a terrorist organization to learn more about his dead parents. He's curious to the point of casual self-destruction. Thankfully, Alex is incredibly difficult to kill.

Alex can be just as stubborn as he is curious, if the mood takes him. And it usually does when he decides he doesn't like someone. When he first got into the spy business, he was perhaps a bit more purely motivated by the simple will to live, but even the boundless enthusiasm of youth has its limits and Alex surpassed those months ago. Thankfully, whenever he starts to feel overwhelmed these days, he doesn't give up he just gets angry. At this point, Alex is alive more out of petty spite for the world trying to kill him than anything, really.

Thankfully, at his heart Alex is a kind, well-meaning boy who genuinely wants to help people, so he never takes this anger out on others. In fact his driving need to help people the second half of what gets him into so much trouble. If he finds out that someone is suffering or in trouble, he just can't leave well enough alone (and certainly doesn't trust other people to take care of the problem). While in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest, Alex discovered that a fellow patient was about to be abducted and fooled the kidnappers into thinking that he was the target instead. On his first day of school at Brookland his soft spoken nature made the school bullies think he was a good target. When he was done with them, they didn't bully anyone at the school. He used a construction site crane to literally deliver a meth lab house boat to the front doors of the police because they liked to sell at his school and he saw his classmates suffering for it.

Which actually brings me to another interesting aspect of Alex's life experiences and the effect that it's had on his psyche. In a lot of ways, he may have the capabilities of a full grown adult, but at the end of the day he's still a kid and he's still learning, maturing. While being supplied for a small office infiltration mission in Crocodile Tears, the man gearing him up makes a casual comment about how much Alex likes his explosions. Because Alex's go to solution for trouble is to literally set fire to it. He reacts in extremes because his brain literally hasn't matured enough to full understand the consequences of his actions.

In Scorpia, they make a very big point about the fact that his aim with guns deteriorates the moment you make a person his target, that he has some sort of mental block when it comes to taking someone's life with a gun. And yet consistently, in every single book, Alex is indirectly responsible for the deaths of numerous people through his actions and has a bad habit of making macabre jokes about them. The only death that ever really gets to him is the man that commits suicide in front of him in response to something Alex tells him. Hearing about an accidental death caused from his actions after the fact doesn't mean anything to him, he has to see the death with his own eyes for it to even be real.

Alex has a weird talent for orchestrating strange, accidental deaths. The life of a spy is a dangerous one, and if he wasn't quick and clever and good at improvisation, he would have died on his first mission out. See the house boat meth lab example from above, or that time he fashioned an ironing board into a snow board to get down a mountain. Or that other time he blew the floatie part off a sea plane and used it as a canoe to escape from an organ farming hospital in the middle of the Australian jungle. This is actually one of the few instances in which his age honestly benefits him as a spy, since his youth and inexperience lends itself well to strange bursts of creativity when it comes to finding solutions.

No matter how bad his day gets, Alex typically manages to keep his cool, analyze the situation, and come up with a solution to it in short order. He's come to realize that nobody else will save him, so he has to do it himself. Panicking doesn't do him any good at all. And when a situation seems completely hopeless? That good old aforementioned anger manages to come in quite handy as a form of motivation instead.

Just because he's managed to survive his time with MI6, doesn't mean he's come out of the whole experience unscathed, of course. Outside of the obvious physical scars he bears the psychological effects could be considered far more dire. Each time Alex comes back alive from another mission, he finds it just a little bit harder to connect with his peers. He's not even fifteen yet, and he's already forgotten what it feels like to be a normal kid. It's also very nearly impossible for him to trust anybody outside of a very small, trusted circle, and he's especially wary of adults. They always want something from him, and they always take advantage of the power imbalance between them to get what they want. Altruistic people are met with suspicion, and figures of authority are absolutely not to be trusted. He's been burned too many times before.

Outside of his interpersonal hangups, Alex is also currently suffering PTSD from all manner of terrible things that have happened to him. He isn't explicitly aware of this issue since he's never had the chance to see any sort of licensed therapist about any of this, and some of the things that might serve to trigger him would be difficult to predict without any sort of context, but considering the number of times he's almost drowned that's definitely one of them. Being confined or drugged against his will would also serve to send him into a panic. A panic that he will more than likely respond to with violence, though again, without context of the situation it's impossible to be sure.

Alex is anxious, wary, and slow to trust, though he'll usually cover that up with a thin veneer of good manners and shallow friendliness. He's actually a pretty decent actor, perhaps partly because of the act that MI6 has forced him to play in his real life, though his time with Scorpia certainly strengthened any weak points he might have had in this area.

He's been burned, drowned, poisoned, drugged, shot, tortured, and he hasn't even turned 15. He's tired, fed up, so so angry, and doesn't see any way out. If he doesn't get out soon, though, he's going to self destruct. It's only a matter of time, really.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping: Just a normal human child, really. With spy training.

Inventory: Most of his inventory are gadgets from his spy gig. You can find details about the capabilities of the gadgets I chose here.

• His clothes
• Gameboy from Stormbreaker
• Tricked out bike from Eagle Strike
• Jersey from Eagle Strike
• backpack with school supplies with 1 exploding gel pen from Crocodile Tears slipped in with regular school supplies
• his inhaler from Ark Angel

Writing Samples: Here and here on the test drive, as well as here and here in a previous game.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Mel
Player Age: 29
Player Contact: itsmel or Mel#0452 on Discord

Other Characters In Game: N/A
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Alex Rider: Mel
Permissions for Character: Here.
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Absolutely!
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: I'm a huge fan of ghost stories and the types of horror you can't punch your way out of. Things where you lose all sense of control. I prefer the cerebral over the physical horror, but I'm likely to enjoy it either way, especially if there are lasting after effects.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Nah.
Additional Information: