I am a human missile

PLAYER: Xep
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yep
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: I’ll be 18 on the 6th.
CONTACT: Plurk – xep_lag, Skype – xep-lag
CHARACTERS PLAYED:Bigby Wolf

NAME: Jack Ryan
CANON: Bioshock
CANON REFERENCE: http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Jack
AGE: 4 years old; appearance-wise he seems to be a young adult, somewhere in his early 20s.
GENDER: Male
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Grade 7
APPEARANCE: http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100109134746/bioshockfrance/fr/images/8/87/Jack_Ryan_Portrait.png
http://fandomania.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bioshock06.jpg
He is 6’2”, burly Russian-American that wears two-tone shoes and a cableknit turtleneck sweater that looks like his grandma made it for him. He has tattoos on each of his inner wrists, in the shape of three linked chains. One of his eyes is blue and the other is brown (headcanon).


PERSONALITY:
Jack was intended to be a blank slate. Fontaine had no time for dealing with a personality incongruent with his, so when he dreamed up a life for Jack he mostly made him very average. But he did add a few things to make Jack survive a bit longer in Rapture. Jack is cocky, to handle the opinions of other people. Jack is quiet, so Fontaine never had to deal with his voice. Jack is reckless, so he can survive more than five seconds when things twice his size and speed are trying to kill him. And Jack is loyal, so he can cling pointedly to the idea that Atlas is real.

Those are all traits given to Jack Wynand, though. They are how he’s lived his life, as far as he’s concerned, but now that he’s discovered his true identity as Jack Ryan, and after all that time in Rapture, a mix of Jack Wynand’s personality and his true personality has arisen.

Jack’s cockiness has mellowed out a lot during his time in Rapture. While Jack Wynand lived his life knowing he was a special snowflake because mama and papa said so, Jack Ryan has done far too many things that only Frank Fontaine would consider to be “doing great things”. While Jack remains stubborn, he has in fact become rather modest and self-deprecating. Most of his good memories are not real and he makes a point of reminding himself of this. He was raised to kill people. He is a terrible person and it’s all Fontaine’s fault.

Speaking of which, dear god is Jack stubborn. Now that he’s on the surface he finally has autonomy, and dear god is he going to use it. And worse, his trip through Rapture has left him wary of authority at best, if not anxious that they will start controlling him. Currently Jack has entered his second “no” stage; he will eat when he wants, sleep when he wants, smoke when he wants, and no one can stop him. If they try too hard he may even pitch a fit. Although at the same time, kind offers excite him, and usually erase any previous stubbornness from his mind.

While Jack was a loud child when he was two years old, Fontaine was unimpressed by his habit of mouthing off and had him programmed to be quiet. His mind was programmed to remind him upon opening his mouth that no one cares what he has to say, and while Tenenbaum has removed the actual programming for this he still habitually speaks as little as possible. On the other hand, whenever he does speak he is very blunt. He doesn’t want to speak if he doesn’t have to, so honesty is the quickest way to get what he wants to say across.

Jack’s recklessness is not to be confused with bravery; he just has no sense of “this will probably get me hurt”. Jack still has to remember that stepping in fire and falling out of the second story hurts, and also unfortunately learning that not literally everyone who touches him is out to kill him. Jack is prone to making split-second decisions that more often than not lead to someone getting hurt, and is unused to working in groups so he tends to shoot out on his own. Worse yet this doubles for social interaction and, added to the fact that he rarely thinks ahead further than five minutes, he’s just… not built for being a people person.

And then there is Jack’s loyalty. Well, he was modeled after a dog and in a lot of ways that’s not entirely wrong for his true personality. Jack has a child’s innocence, muddied as it is by what people have done to him, and when people ask him to trust him he ends up doing it even if he shouldn’t just because he wants to believe they’re trustworthy. Give him an inch and he will give a mile, just out of the hope that it’ll make someone happy with him. And if anyone he values is in danger, he will break heads for them. Loyalty is a dangerous thing, though. Jack has literally killed people because someone he trusted wanted him to. Not just for Fontaine, but for Tenenbaum as well.

As much as Jack is upset about what Fontaine has made him do, he actually remains rather numb to the thought of killing people as long as he’s given a good reason to. He can’t remember the name or face of a single splicer he killed, or the three men Cohen commissioned him to kill for that matter, and it took the emotional devastation of Ryan’s pre-death speech to make him remember that. Jack’s perspective is still very black-and-white, and if he is told someone is bad then they are bad and should die. It’s as simple as that, as far as he’s concerned.

When it comes to himself, though, he very pointedly insists that he is good and he only did bad things because Fontaine made him. He’s so insistent, probably, because he doesn’t believe it himself. He feels absolutely terrible for everything he’s done and, because he doesn’t know how to deal with his own mistakes, he has packed all that fear and guilt into a tight ball of hatred for Fontaine that he tries his absolute best to keep to himself now that Fontaine is dead and he can’t do anything about it.

Well, you know what they say. There are no bad dogs. Only bad dog owners.

Speaking of dogs, Jack is scared of them because he’s completely convinced he will hurt them if he tries to pet them and he can’t be convinced otherwise. This is one of the accidentally programmed behaviors he has, but there are others that were much more useful in Rapture. Things such as hoarding random objects he deems useful, locking and barricading rooms before he sleeps, and refusing to go anywhere he can’t take his wrench. He also has an unhealthy attachment to his sweater but that’s more of an accidental side effect to being stuck in the bottom of the ocean storing everything in it.


POWERS/ABILITIES:
Due to his DNA being played around with by our good friends Tenenbaum and Suchong, his X-gene’s been boosted way more influential than it should be at his age. His powers add up to basically the Super Soldier Serum; his strength, endurance, agility, speed, reflexes and durability have been pushed to the maximum of human potential. He cannot heal much faster than a normal human, but can easily compartmentalize pain, well enough that he may need to be reminded he has a broken limb. His body’s functions are also highly streamlined, so even a bag of potato chips can at least minorly aid his healing. Jack can go much longer without food, water, medical attention or sleep than a normal person, and while he is addicted to nicotine and alcohol it takes a good long while for withdrawal symptoms to show up. As a side effect, he can’t really get drunk. His metabolism processes it within minutes, so his best hope is to be tipsy for a few minutes after a few entire bottles of wine.

Another side effect to his genetic reprogramming is a list of vocal commands which, if spoken, override Jack’s conscience until he has completed whatever task they imply. He is fully unaware of most of them and, in any case, unable to say the phrases himself. Trying to makes his memory go entirely blank for a few seconds and is very jarring and upsetting. They are as follows:

“Would you kindly” – spoken before or after a command, this plants an idea in Jack’s head and makes him unavoidably perform the task he’s given. This can be anything from picking an object up, to killing someone, to finding and operating a machine (assuming he can figure out how to), to completely rewriting his memory of something or erasing information altogether from his mind. If he’s physically unable to perform the action, he will do the second best thing or give up and regain autonomous control. Whether or not he wants to perform the action is irrelevant because it makes him want to.

“Code Yellow” – gives Jack a heart attack, and several subsequent heart attacks until he eventually dies.

“Code Green” – reverses Code Yellow, but does not fix any damage caused. (in canon CY cannot be reversed, but accidentally killing Jack would be a problem.)

“Code Red” – a hard reset; forces Jack to pass out, entirely wipe any new information and go back to lab defaults. Which means not remembering anything but the life Fontaine programmed into him.

“Providence” – calms Jack down immediately; no matter how panicked he is, this is reassuring and fixes everything.

“Leave it” – forces him to stop whatever he’s doing, may need to be used several time if he’s being stubborn. He is four, after all, and nothing's stopping him from starting again after a moment.

“Drop it” – similarly, makes him immediately release whatever’s in his hands.

“Focus” – makes him instantly ignore everything except the speaker. Until something else distracts him.

“Bang!” – makes Jack go limp and play dead for a while. He can stop whenever he wants but it comes with a sense of urgency to continue until he’s deemed it’s safe to get up.

Along with these, Jack is attuned to certain voices and accents. Irish accents are calming to him, while Russian accents make him distinctly uncomfortable. Due to Tenenbaum’s influence, he also has a soft spot for German accents. Also, touching weapons such as guns and blunt objects grants him instant knowledge of how to use them, so long as it’s reasonable for Fontaine to have added the knowledge to his subconscious.

Speaking of weapons, he has an unhealthy attachment to his wrench and you’re not getting it away from him. He’ll cry. That thing’s been through hell with him. Also, as of his birthday (Sep 1) he has a glove for his left hand that grants him electric powers. He can zap people and jumpstart electrical devices, but it has to be recharged often and needs some upgrades to be used effectively in combat.


AU HISTORY:
It starts with a city. Shortly after the Hiroshima bombing, Andrew Ryan decided he had had enough of big governments and their wars. He was going to make a city at the bottom of the ocean that would live free from the surface, forever. So he did. He made the city of Rapture, which at the time was undetectable due to his use of the highest available level of technology. The city of Rapture was mostly self-sustaining, ruled by a council open to the people’s questions, and worked on two simple laws: do not take what you do not deserve, and do not contact the surface in any way. This was to be a perfect city, one where the artist would not fear the censor and where no one would be bound by morality.

Yeah, that sounds great, doesn’t it. It didn’t work out as planned.

A few year after the city was built, Ryan invited down a name named Frank Fontaine. Fontaine had come down to gain blackmail material, but instead was approached by Brigid Tenenbaum, who had discovered a slug containing a substance in its blood called ADAM. ADAM works like a cancerous x-gene; it can be changed into different forms, and rearrange the DNA of whoever injects or injests it to give them some sort of mutation. Fontaine funded a project to learn about the properties of ADAM, and ended up with a full-scale commercial production of it within Rapture and a breed of specially mutated girls named Little Sisters granted the power to draw leftover ADAM from corpses to double harvesting of the substance.

At first, all was well. The city had discovered a secret that could revolutionize everything. The mutations could be channeled expertly by the people Tenenbaum educated, to change the people of Rapture into anyone they wanted to be. But it came at a cost. ADAM is highly unstable and needed to be followed by drugs that would inhibit further mutation, plus surgeries to fix unwanted mutations once they happened. Many people found that no matter how much money they had brought from the surface, they couldn’t keep up with their new addiction. The city went to hell as “splicers” were driven into insanity and terribly deformed by the ADAM, staying alive only to kill others and gain their ADAM. And Ryan was not pleased.

An all-out war started between Ryan and Fontaine, and in September of ’58 Fontaine was shot and killed. Or so everyone thought. In reality he had staged his death, swapped faces with someone else and planned a near-flawless battle strategy against Ryan. And here is where Jack comes in.

Ryan had security set with DNA locks to only allow him and those of his immediate family through the doors that separated parts of Rapture. It would be impossible for anyone to come near him unless they were related. So, Fontaine bought the embryo of Ryan’s child from a hooker he had slept with, prior to her giving him the news. The child was given to Tenenbaum and her coworker Yi Suchong, who basically rebuilt the child from scratch. There they found an x-gene and mutated it with ADAM, creating a natural host of the substance. Jack was strengthened by ADAM’s mutations, and with the scientists’ guidance he was quickly built into a perfect soldier. Eat your heart out, Dr. Erskine.

During Jack’s first two years of life, he grew at breakneck speed and was constantly put through tests, forced into Skinner boxes and had his genes molded on a daily basis to make him exactly what Fontaine had envisioned. It was an emotionally breaking experience, and without constant memory erasure Jack would consistently refuse to eat or throw temper tantrums and destroy lab equipment. In the end Tenenbaum ended up having to imprint a natural draw to herself just to get him to listen to her, on top of the commands Suchong had imprinted on him.

After he was deemed complete, Jack’s memory was replaced with the memory of Jack Wynand, a young man from Kansas who had done nothing particularly interesting in his entire life. He was doomed to sleepwalk until a letter from Fontaine sent him back to Rapture. As far as Jack knew, he had been visiting his cousin in England when the plane crashed and he ended up as the sole survivor. What he didn’t know is that he had been brainwashed by Fontaine’s commands to murder everyone on the plane and crash it himself.

When Jack entered Rapture, he was immediately adopted by “Atlas”, a new persona of Fontaine’s who was supposedly a worker from Dublin who had come to Rapture seeking fortune and found instead that the people of Rapture needed salvation from Ryan. Jack was guided through Rapture, killing anyone he came across in the name of self-defense, sure that he was helping Atlas save his family and get to safety.

Along the way, Jack ran across the Little Sisters, and Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum was working on saving them, reversing their mutation so that they could return to the surface and live a normal life. Against Atlas’s wishes, Jack agreed to help and made a habit of rescuing any Little Sister he came across. Tenenbaum rewarded him generously with gifts of ADAM and snacks, while Atlas quietly chided him.

Eventually Jack managed to confront Ryan, who had finally discovered the truth; that Jack was his son, and had been brainwashed into killing him. Ryan saw that Jack had lost all of his free will, the one thing that he valued in men. And so, suffering this final disappointment, Ryan decided to teach Jack a valuable lesson by exposing Atlas’s secrets (or as many as he knew, unaware as he was that Atlas was Fontaine) and then commanding Jack to kill him. Jack obliged, as he had no choice, only to be mocked by Fontaine as he finally revealed himself.

The plan had been, after that, for Fontaine to kill Jack and take his business to the surface. Instead, Tenenbaum rescued Jack by guiding him with the Little Sisters, and brought him back to her hideout where she worked on removing some of Fontaine’s influence. She discovered that, as he was built entirely on her and Suchong’s influence, she could only create a temporary fix before he returned to the state he had been in before.

This was enough, though. With Tenenbaum’s help, Jack ended up being able to chase Fontaine down and battle him. Fontaine had mutated himself beyond recognition to match Jack’s strength, but Jack won out in the end and, with some help from the Little Sisters, managed to kill Fontaine.

At this point Tenenbaum had planned to bring Jack and the Sisters with her to the surface, but Jack was separated from them on the way and trapped by the debris as Rapture began to truly fall apart. In a panic Jack sealed himself in one of the Vita-Chambers, which was quickly buried in that part of the city.

Rapture continued to exist, sealed from the ocean and kept a secret by its sole survivor, Tenenbaum. Jack’s DNA continued to be stored in the Vita-Chambers, scared for years to even make himself known. As if he knew how to. Finally, after nearly 60 years he started begging silently to be let out. He just wanted to do something, if not help Tenenbaum and her girls. The desperation of his thoughts was picked up by Xavier, and an expedition was finally sent to investigate.

What they found was a crumbling city full of terrifying and only arguably human monsters. By now Rapture has completely fallen to pieces, and is inhabited mostly by aquatic mutants built for hunting at the bottom of the ocean and occasionally coming onto land. And in the middle they recovered a Vita-Chamber that promptly presented them with a certain young man in a terrible sweater.

He was brought back to the Institute where he refused to speak, eat, sleep or do basically anything for days. It’s only recently that he started regaining his curiosity, and was put in school in the hopes that he would open up. However, he was placed in the lowest grade since his education was mostly made up on the spot by a man from the ‘60s who had never been to school himself, and Jack needed to start from scratch to fit in properly. Enter the tallest 7th grader. Ever. In the history of time.

While Jack mutated himself a lot during his stay in Rapture, the DNA was somehow changed during his time in the Vita-Chamber and left him only with his original design. He has, however, retained all of his memories both as Jack Ryan and Jack Wynand.

NETWORK SAMPLE: Jack being an idiot.
Note: All mentions of Tenenbaum are incorrect for this version of Jack. Originally I had planned to modernize him and have him live with Tenenbaum, but while writing the app I realized there’s no way to make him being with Tenenbaum outside of Rapture actually work without some serious shoehorning.

LOG SAMPLE: Jack has always been prone to nightmares. Back on the farm, his mama had always told him it was because people meant to do great things always had nightmares. He had never found it as reassuring as he thought he should. But the farm isn’t real, mama isn’t real and now remember her words just leaves a terrible taste in his mouth.

He hasn’t even met anyone yet. He hasn’t been anywhere above the water except inside the plane that carried him out, and the room he’d been allowed to stay in. He hasn’t wanted to leave this room. Everything is too new and he’s not used to… doing anything, he doesn’t want to do it too fast. Maybe if he does he’ll do something wrong and break. He’s not even sure anymore.

He’s sure it would be fine if it weren’t for the nightmares.

He used to get surreal, nondescript dreams. He wasn’t sure what he was scared of. He was just scared. Now he knows what he’s scared of, though. He’s scared of what he is. He’s been dreaming of ending up like Fontaine, of getting attached to the feeling of killing or the looks of terror on the faces of people around him. He’s been dreaming of ruling the world and shooting up all the ADAM he could possibly want. It terrifies him to want things that selfish. It terrifies him that he could be turning into the man he fear so much. The man who has ruined every part of his life in ways no one should be able to ruin it.

Maybe if Tenenbaum were here she could tell him he isn’t anything like Fontaine. She could convince him he’s done more good than Fontaine ever considered. But she isn’t here and no one here understands. He doesn’t want them to understand.

He just wants to be normal.