OOC - BNW App

[divine_braid]

PLAYER INFO

Name: Sailor G
Contact Information: Email: jlsullivan [at] crystal realm [dot] net, Plurk: duches77, AIM: Duches77
Time Zone: Eastern US (EDT or EST depending on time of year)
Characters Played: Minako Aino child_of_luv


CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Duo Maxwell
Character Canon: Gundam Wing

History: Duo Maxwell on the Gundam Wiki

AU History: Duo is an orphan and was living at one of the churches in Union up until the massive earthquake caused by Team Evolution. It isn't known what happened to his parents as he was discovered by the priest in charge while living in the upper levels of the Old City with a small gang of other children and their Pokemon. Most of the children in the gang had all bonded with Pokemon that lived around town, mostly for survival and companionship. The priest, Father Maxwell, took Duo and his gang back to the church where he and the head nun, Sister Helen, raised them, even sending them to school, until the earthquake.

By that time, most of the children had been adopted and sent to new homes, but Duo and his Houndour were troublemakers and kept getting sent back. Soon, he was the last one left of the gang still living at the church. Duo had begun to see the Father and Sister as his parents, and was very protective of them from others. Father Maxwell even began to potentially see Duo as becoming a priest in his own right. However, the day of the earthquake changed all that. The church was destroyed. Duo had been at school the day it happened, and wasn't able to return until the area was deemed safe. By then, he had found out that both the Father and Sister had been buried in the rubble and killed.

After the earthquake, Duo and his Houndour made their way on their own, living once again in the upper levels of the Old City ruins, until he happened upon a group of salvage men who called themselves the Sweepers scouring the newly discovered areas underneath for useful items to refurbish and salvage towards daily use. Duo joined up with them and has been working with them for almost a year, learning to also be an engineer. It was while he was on a job with the Sweepers that he met his Duskull.

Canon Personality: Duo is an exercise in duality. In many ways, he lives up to his name. Normally, he's a cheerful, outgoing person with an odd sense of humor and a loud way of speaking. He's friendly, seemingly open, and appears to wear his emotions on his sleeve. He's very tactile with others, often patting them on the back or putting his arm around them in a friendly gesture. He smiles a lot, and is quick with a laugh. Sometimes, his outgoing nature is even over the top as he vies for the center of attention and grates on the nerves of quieter, more serious-natured people. He also tends to come off as cocky and self-assured, a bit of a show-off around others when things are calm and relaxed. But that's all okay, see, because he truly believes that anyone he's around often enough will eventually succumb to the acquired taste of friendship that is Duo Maxwell.

A weird thing about Duo is that he prides himself on being truthful, yet he keeps most of himself in shadow and secrecy. While Duo doesn't necessarily outright lie, he often conceals the truth from others (most especially his true feelings or abilities). A famous line he uses in introduction is, "I may run and hide, but I never tell lies." He says this to the rebels who have the church under siege before he runs out to steal them a mobile suit. He also says this to Quatre as a way of introduction, telling the other pilot that's "me in a nutshell". I believe he can justify to himself his choices of what he reveals to others as the idea that he's hiding, but not lying.

See, there is a whole other side to Duo's personality that he doesn't often show. He keeps a good portion of himself hidden. Duo is smart, and he's secretive, and he does it to survive. He prefers to be underestimated by his opponents when it comes to battles or missions. He has a knack for blending in with the crowd and disappearing from surveillance. He can be quiet when it counts. He takes his missions seriously, despite the impression he gives off. And he can be very, very dark, even morbid, in his thoughts.

Duo exhibits classic signs of PTSD and survivor's guilt. In canon, he experiences a lot of loss, before he's even 12 years old. He's already a nameless orphan when he first shows up, and we never meet his parents in canon. He develops a bond with one of the members of his street gang, Solo, but the other boy dies from a plague even though he promised Duo he would never leave him alone. This is where Duo gives himself his name, stating that if the one boy was Solo, than the two of them would be Duo. This is his way of keeping Solo's spirit with him. He spends time living at a church, where he gradually opens up and develops a parental bond with the priest, Father Maxwell, and the nun, Sister Helen, even through acting out in many ways like fighting other kids in school. But during a rebellion of the colonists against the Earth Sphere Alliance, the church is blown up, killing the priest and the nun when Duo was only 8 years old. It's from Father Maxwell that Duo takes his surname, and starts to wear clothing that resembles a priest's collar. Fandom speculates that he even wears a gold cross necklace from Father Maxwell hidden under his clothes, and it's shown in many works of fanart and even some official artbook works, though it's never directly mentioned in canon story materials, like the anime or any of the manga. He also continues to wear his long hair in a braid for Sister Helen, as she had braided it after he fought her over cutting it off when he first arrived. Duo is surprisingly sentimental and cherishes those he's lost.

This high amount of loss in his young life causes him to keep everyone else he meets later at arm's length for a long time after meeting. While he pretends to be outgoing and happy and open, he's actually hiding his fear of loss behind a figurative mask. Duo doesn't let himself get close to anyone until he finally feels comfortable that they won't leave him. And that takes a long time or an extraordinary event for him to get past. Once he does let himself get close, he gets extremely protective, even possessive, of the other person until he feels somewhat certain they're not going to die. In canon, he panics when Quatre sacrifices himself to get Duo and Wufei into outerspace, yelling for Quatre to come with them. When Hilde puts herself in danger to get the information on Space Fortress Libra, Duo acts angry at her, telling her she was being foolish for letting herself get hurt. Just several episodes before, the ZERO system caused him to hallucinate that he killed her, freaking him out and he never used the ZERO system again.

His fear of loss and attachment shows in that he only allows himself to get close to people he thinks will survive. He eventually allows himself to befriend the other pilots because he sees them to be like himself, survivors, and he eventually trusts them that they won't get killed. He also gradually starts to show that he cares for them, even telling them and Hilde at times to stay alive and not die. Hilde is a military pilot when he first meets her, and he's reminded of that later when she survives her escape from Libra despite overwhelming odds and injury. He also develops a strong attachment to his first Gundam, something he initially sees as indestructible, and is crushed when he watches it get destroyed half-way through the series. Near the end of the series, he even makes a comment to Trowa, who was the one who had to destroy Duo's Gundam to maintain his cover in the OZ military, that he'll never forgive the other pilot for blowing up his partner.

Another sign of his damaged psyche is the fact that, at 12 years old, when he introduces himself to Professor G, he refers to himself as the God of Death (or, in the original Japanese script, Shinigami). Duo sees himself as a bringer of death to those around him and possibly even unable to die himself. He's out-lived his parents, whatever it was that happened to them (the Episode Zero manga leads us to believe that the orphans he's with in the beginning are war orphans, implying that the parents of all the children, including Duo, may have been killed during battles on the colony). He's survived a plague, despite not receiving any medication, and showed no signs of illness when the other kids in his gang were sick and one died. He lived through a colony rebellion through sheer luck of not being there when the building he was living in was destroyed by the military, killing the Father, the Sister, and all the rebels that had taken it hostage inside. Duo tells people at times that someone needs to do the dirty work, so it might as well be him. He sees his life as a fluke, a product of sheer dumb luck, and believes it to be cheap as a result. This leads him to be a little reckless and take risks, as he's pretty sure he won't die anyway, and, even if he does, no one will really care.

Because of his violent history on an often battle torn colony, Duo hates unnecessary killing. He hates it so much that in the prequel manga, Episode Zero, and in the flashback sequences of Endless Waltz, we see him attempt to destroy Deathscythe before Operation Meteor because he found out what their mission was, and that their sponsor, the Barton Foundation, was planning on dropping a colony on Earth to create a nuclear winter. Professor G convinces him to "steal" Deathscythe (which was really just Professor G and the Sweepers letting him take it early) and go to Earth on his own to fight OZ directly instead of waiting for the fated colony drop. Early in the main series, we see him attacking OZ installations and military, but he feels it's necessary for the sake of the colonies, and he always avoids killing civilians. Yet, it still bothers him that he might become what he hates, and that he might be creating more orphans like himself, because he believes that's all that war seems to be good for. He actually gives the impression that he's fooling himself into thinking it's all a game just to get through the trauma of doing what he's doing, smiling and making morbid jokes about sending people to meet their maker. However, he goes through with the fighting because he feels his life is cheap, and what he does shouldn't be done by anyone else more valuable. In fact, he actually shows later in the series that he does truly understand just how serious the situation really is as he watches the news announcing political changes that are happening as a result of his battles. During Endless Waltz, he and the other pilots have decided they will no longer kill anyone, regardless of the circumstances. They're tired of being child soldiers, and, despite having to fight to defend the new Earth Sphere Unified Nation from the Barton Foundation, they do so without killing. Rather, they disable the enemy mobile suits, allowing the soldiers inside to live. Even at their bleakest moment, when Duo momentarily suggests they self-destruct their Gundams to overcome the massive number of attacking enemies since they're running out of energy and ammo to fight with, he and the other pilots come to a consensus against the idea as it could mean loss of life outside of their own. He was willing to give up his own life, because he thinks it doesn't matter, but he stopped himself when he realized that others might also be killed in the process.

AU Deviation: Much of Duo's life in BNW mirrors his canon life, so much of his personality is likely to as well. He has the same level of loss, leaving him with the same difficulties when it comes to forming relationships and friendships. However, while the fear of loss is still there, it's source is different. Instead of battles and fighting creating a hatred for unnecessary killing, Duo won't be thinking much about war. In BNW, war is a distant thing that hasn't really affected him directly. He still has strong survival skills, but his ability to fight is less honed when it comes to battle against others instead of just surviving against wild Pokemon, and he'll be less likely to hate the idea of killing in a battle for survival. He doesn't like it, per se (he's not a murderer), but it doesn't haunt him anywhere near as much.

Canon Abilities: Because of his history on the streets as an orphan, Duo is most definitely a gifted urban survivalist. He's excellent at petty thievery, pick-pocketing, breaking and entering, escaping capture, and hiding in plain sight. He knows how to tell when someone isn't home that he can 'borrow' their house or apartment for a little while until they get back, and he knows how to scavenge among discarded stuff, finding what's still useful among what's thought to be trash.

When Duo gets captured, most of the time, it's because he let himself be captured for some ulterior motive, and he'll wait, albeit impatiently, as long as needed to fulfill that motive, as demonstrated by the way he remains with the others on Lunar Base while the engineers rebuild their Gundams in secret under OZ's noses. He's great at getting away, disappearing, and breaking free of capture. Lock-picking is a life skill, not just a hobby. And he can hide tools in undetectable ways to help him get free once no one's looking (like small explosive devices tucked away into his long hair!).

He's skilled with firearms and gadgets, using technology to its full advantage whenever he can instead of fighting hand-to-hand. He breaks into a heavily guarded wing of a military hospital to extract Heero and uses everything from guns to explosives to a hand-held beam-bladed propeller glider to escape. He can spy on communications, tap into secure data feeds, and reconfigure the hardware of a computer to work however he wants it to, doing exactly that in Endless Waltz to find information on the Barton Foundation, the status of the colony's control systems, and what shuttles were docked in the hangar bay available for them to use for escape.

He's a fast talker, keeping people verbally off-balance and distracted, as he manages to get Hilde to rethink her enlistment with OZ while she has a gun pointed at his head. He's good at drawing attention when he wants it and avoiding attention when he doesn't. He'd make an excellent slight of hand magician with his mastery of distraction. He created a scene around several OZ guards while even handcuffed and captured, giving the undercover Trowa an opening to pass information to both him and Wufei without the other guards knowing.

And he can run. He's fast and agile, making him great at both sports like basketball and evading enemies through the halls of a military base.

Duo's years with the Sweepers and Professor G also left him with serious salvage and repair skills. This is shown when he completes the work on his second Gundam by himself by attacking military supply routes for parts to steal and using them to finish building the portions of it that the Gundam engineers weren't able to complete before the destruction of Lunar Base. Gundams are highly specialized and advanced mobile suits, so being able to fix one, let alone finish building one, is not something to be taken lightly, especially considering Duo had minimal formal schooling (at the most, a year while living at Maxwell's Church). Duo basically exhibits signs of being something almost akin to a super mechanic, trained directly by the masterful engineer who developed his Gundam.

Duo is also an operator. This means means he can operate almost anything he gets behind the controls of, whether it's a spaceship or shuttle, heavy construction equipment like a crane or a tractor or a bulldozer, a plane, boat, submarine, car, truck, or a giant battle-ready robot. In fact, the only time Duo exhibits difficulty operating a piece of equipment is when he's forced to pilot Wing Zero against his will. The ZERO system ends up giving him frightening hallucinations, and he bails out, never touching the Gundam again. Later, in Endless Waltz, the main character of the Gundam pilots, Heero (who's shown in canon to be some sort of super soldier), even implies that Duo might actually be the better pilot of the two of them by admitting that he's counting on Duo's skills to get them into the besieged colony under heavy artillery fire. And Duo delivers on that expectation with ease, sliding them into the loading dock in a full-frontal charge right into the beam guns. And Heero slept through most of the trip.

While in his Gundam, Duo, by extension, has the same abilities. Deathscythe's first incarnation is fast, lightly armored, maneuverable, and designed for close combat. It uses a shield and wields a massive beam scythe for it's main weapon. Like all Gundams, it has two machine guns mounted on either side of it's head. It's capable of lifting massive objects, and jumping very long distances, almost enough to be considered full-on, low-altitude flight, as it has very powerful engines to give it the high speed capabilities it possesses. It's beam weapons are usable under water, unlike most beam weaponry, and the Gundam is air-tight, meaning it can be used safely under water for extended periods of time, and it's safe to use in outerspace. The shield has a hidden beam blade in one end that can be activated as a secondary weapon, and it also has small vernier engines that enable it to be launched from the Gundam's arm in case a distance weapon is needed. The Gundam also has a hyper-jammer equipped, giving it stealth-like abilities that allow it to sneak up on its enemies almost completely undetected and invisible from radar (it's still visible to the naked eye).

When Duo receives the rebuilt and upgraded Deathscythe Hell, he keeps all of these abilities with some improvements and additional abilities. Deathscythe Hell is more durable and faster than its predecessor. It can maneuver in the vacuum of space a lot better. It can also jump and glide farther, and has foldable wings with small engines mounted on them that can either be used open for high speed maneuvers or gliding (and some psychological intimidation factors), or can be folded down over the torso to allow for additional shielding and armor in heavy artillery fire. The beam scythe has an additional blade, making it a double-bladed weapon. And the hyper-jammer has been upgraded to a full cloaking device, making the Gundam not only invisible to radar, but to the naked eye as well.

The Endless Waltz version of Deathscythe Hell does not have the shield and exhibits actual re-entry abilities using larger folding wings than the previous version. It also goes back to a single blade on the scythe, and has large spikes on the knees and toes. However, in the flashbacks during the movie, while difficult to see, it's visible that the newest design is being used in the flashbacks, that the redesign was retconned into the character's past instead of it being an in-story upgrade between the end of the series and the beginning of the movie. There is also no actual explanation in canon as to why the Gundams were redesigned a second time when all that happened after that was the pilots decided to send them into the sun to be destroyed at the very beginning of the movie. Some fans attempted to work the redesign into the storyline with doujinshi (one was even published in Japan and translated as an import to North America, called Ground Zero), and it tends to be a relatively accepted idea that the Gundams may have been upgraded before the movie, ignoring the idea that the designs were retconned in the flashbacks, or just accepting the flashbacks as having artistic license.

Enlightened Abilities: Duo is a dual-type Enlightened (Dark/Ghost). He's an Engineer, and usually carries a Bright Powder and/or a Quick Claw on his person at all times. He also carries a gun he created that's enhanced with the move Bullet Punch. Other items related to mimicking his canon possessions and abilities will be developed in game as part of his Engineer ability. After his first evolution, he will gain a third type, Steel, to represent his Gundam.

Duo's the fastest of the Gundam pilots in canon, so having a speed-boosting item would be expected.

All the pilots carry guns throughout the show, and I really can't see Duo not having something to protect himself with.

His typing goes with the idea of him calling himself the God of Death. As he doesn't remember what happened to his parents, it's likely he picked up his Ghost typing then... perhaps having been killed with them. While this will be my reasoning in-game for this, Duo, as a character, won't know why he's a ghost. His memory of this time is blocked.

As for Engineer, Duo's something of a mechanical prodigy, so it would make sense that he keep that here.

Duo has already awakened to his Enlightened abilities. At game start, his first evolution has these moves:
Beat Up
Thief

First Evolution (picks up Steel type):
Grudge
Nightmare

Second Evolution:
Dark Pulse (replaces Beat Up)
Phantom Force (replaces Nightmare)

As Duo evolves, he will pick up some of the features of his Gundams. In his first evolution, he relies completely on enhanced items, unable to generate anything on his own. In his first evolution, he can use his Steel typing to create a scythe-like weapon similar to what his Gundam has in canon, which he can imbue with Dark type energy along the blade. On his second evolution, he gains black bat-like wings to resemble the wings of his Gundam in canon. He can't outright fly like a bird, but he can jump off high places and glide using thermals for lift. The wings can be folded down to resemble a cloak when he doesn't want them seen or wants to fit into smaller spaces (like Goliath in Disney's Gargoyles).

Starter Pokémon: Houndour, Duskull

Notes/Special Considerations: I'd eventually like to develop the Sweepers as an in-game group characters can join for employment and exploring of ruins.

In canon, the Sweepers are a group of salvage mechanics that Professor G (the engineer that created Deathscythe) was using as a cover to gather supplies and develop the Gundam. They operate as a legitimate business with a space colony branch run by Professor G and an Earth branch run by Howard. They act as Duo's support network when he arrives on Earth with Deathscythe for the first time, and he uses them several times throughout canon as a place to hide and to get quick, cheap repairs for his Gundam. Duo even hooks Hilde up with them in canon after she leaves OZ and it's easy to assume that he starts his own sub-group unified with them once he stops doing Gundam pilot things (though he never fully retires from Gundam pilot life). In a way, he appears to operate some sort of franchise type of shop, affiliated with the Sweepers. There's no named character in canon that acts as a CEO. Professor G was working mostly undercover to build Deathscythe, and Howard, on Earth, was captain of the sea freighter, but didn't seem to be in charge of the company, either.

For BNW AU purposes, they will not be focused on creating weapons of war undercover. They're working to restore humanity's strengths through technology. Like most people in Union, they're not looking to restore PokeBalls or the PC system, but rather to make a better world for Pokemon and humans by improving on old recovered technology they find in ruins, like HMs and TMs, evolution devices, etc. They still act as salvage mechanics in that they find old stuff and fix it, and will also help people in town with fixing stuff like bicycles and other mechanical things. For in game purposes, they'd be a loosely controlled group, most employees acting almost like independent contractors, with no serious structure beyond someone handling finances, someone handling inventory, and someone managing projects (these can all be taken on by characters in game if someone wants to their character to be in that position). I get the impression that it's a very laid back corporate culture because it's always a business that will be needed in some form, but not something that will constantly have steady work. Most of the employees, as independent contractors, will likely have other jobs to fill the gaps between projects (think: crab fishermen on the Bering Sea, construction workers, landscapers, etc.). Because Duo isn't necessarily "in charge" early in canon, he wouldn't be in game, either, when he first starts out, but, if someone feels their character would fit the role, they are welcome to give it a go. I would be glad to offer up information as it's available. Duo may, as the game progresses, reach a point where he wants to open his own small shop that will be affiliated or under the Sweepers, but he'll likely never be a CEO. I'm totally okay with someone else taking the reins of the group if it comes to that. I also have no issue with having Duo refer to the others he works with as "boss" or "job buddy" or some other nickname instead of giving them specific names in case they can be applied for as characters in game.

SAMPLES

First-Person: Test Drive Thread

I know this is kind of old. I'm willing to do a new one if needed or write a sample instead.

Third-Person:

Another long day in the Old City with a few of his crew, looking for items that Professor G could use for his latest project. Half the time, Duo didn't stick his nose in the old man's business. G liked to remain undisturbed when he was working. But sometimes he wandered in to watch, and occasionally G would let him help or teach him about what he was doing. It was moments like those that Duo liked the most. Digging around in the dirt or whatever by the light of one of the crew's Litwicks was okay and all, and he understood it was important to finding old lost technology that could still be useful, but it was kind of boring... and dark.

Duo hated the grind, so to speak. After spending most of his life on his own with nothing to answer for, actually having a job was a hard thing to adapt to. And G had insisted on him going to school again once he got grouped up with them. Though, it wasn't a lot of pressure since he'd bonded with a couple Pokémon already. He hadn't been looking to actually get a Pokémon, but here he was with two.

That was cool, though. The Houndour was fun. He liked to run and dodge and play. The Duskull skulked a lot, hovering around and just shadowing Duo like a weird little demon. As a joke, Duo had tried giving it a little miniature scythe toy, but it didn't hang on to it for long, as it got kind of bored with it. He did manage to scare a few of the guys he worked with, though, before the Pokemon stopped carrying it around. It was a good prank while it lasted.

He sighed, clasping his hands behind his head and looking up at the moon. He'd stolen away from the rest of the group, pretending to have gone off on his own to find things. That meant, of course, he should probably actually find something to bring back, but it let him feel like he wasn't tied down to anything for a little while, at least. Solo, his Houndour, rolled around like crazy. Duo sat up for a moment and stared at him.

"Hey... don't set the grass on fire again, got it?"

The dog-like Pokemon just looked at him, tongue hanging out of his mouth for a moment, panting, then went back to rolling around. Duo shook his head, but smiled. Solo was one of the few who could get a real smile out of him... not just some smartass smirk.

A slight chill over his left shoulder drew his attention to Shinigami.

"And you... we need to figure out what to do with you. Why'd you start following me around, anyway?" The glowing red circle bobbed around behind the skull face like the ghost was studying him. It didn't speak often. Duo was slowly getting used to that. "Right." He flopped back into the grass again and sighed. "The Moon looks pretty awesome tonight, doncha think?"

The Duskull hovered for a moment, looking up for just a moment as well like it was considering Duo's words, and then it floated off to make sure Solo didn't burn the grass in his excitement. Duo shrugged and went back to sky gazing. He still had some time to do nothing before he had to find something remotely useful and head back to the group. Might as well enjoy it while he had it.

Questions:

-What would you say the role of Pokémon is in your life?
They're my buddies, my partners. If it wasn't for the Pokémon I found and bonded with while growing up, I might not be alive today.

-What do you feel your role in Union is?
I don't know that I really have a role. I mean, I'm only alive by sheer luck, so what difference would it make if I had an actual role or not?

-To what lengths would you go to rescue your allies if they were lost in the wilderness?
Anything. I know they'd do the same for me, even if I wouldn't want them to.

-What would you say the most important occupation is within Union?
Mine, of course. I mean, digging up stuff from the past to figure out what we lost. I'd say that's pretty important, wouldn't you?

-What does the story of the Savior mean to you?
I dunno so much about the Savior, really. I mean, it's not like I've ever met her. And while I'm sure there was a big war and all that, it's just all a big story about one person going out there and being honored by the gods, right?

-What aspects and traits do you respect most in your individual fellow man?
Honesty. I hate liars.

-What do you think your Pokémon respect most about you?
I'd like to think it's my awesome sense of humor and sharp wit. [wink wink nudge nudge]

-The gods of old have returned. How would you be judged if you were chosen as a representative of humanity?
[LAUGHS] Seriously? Well, if they do, and all that stuff ends up coming down on me, [clearly disbelieving here] I have a feeling they're gonna be super disappointed. [not ashamed at all by this... just highly amused and loaded with smirks]

-You are alone and bereft of your Pokémon allies, upon what strengths do you rely on to see yourself safely home?
Wouldn't you like to know? [grin] But, hey, just know I'll get home. I'm not worried about it.

-What strengths make you most qualified for your role within Union?
Well, duh. I mean, I'm just good. I know what's useful and what's not. And what better way to recover what we lost in the past than by checking out the old ruins all over the place. Surely there's gotta be something we can use.