bleps: (Default)
ᴍʏ ɴᴀᴍᴇ ɪs Cᴏɴɴᴏʀ ▲ ʀᴋ800 ([personal profile] bleps) wrote2019-03-15 02:52 pm

PRISMATICA APP

PLAYER
HANDLE: Jen
CONTACT: [plurk.com profile] aurajen
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: N/A

CHARACTER
NAME: Connor
CANON: Detroit: Become Human
CANON POINT: Just after the chapter entitled “Meeting Kamski”. However, is also being brought into the game with CRAU from Acatalepsy.
AGE: 3 months in canon, 10 months old after CRAU is applied. Physically, Connor possesses the appearance of someone in his mid-twenties to early thirties, and the cognitive maturity to match.
BACKGROUND: A wiki link.

A note: Since player choice influences aspects of the story, it's worth noting that Connor comes from a route in which he slowly begins to skew towards deviancy, showing empathy and cultivating a friendship with his partner Hank Anderson. He has (amazingly) avoided dying up until the point I'm taking him from.

CRAU Notes: Connor spent several months as a member of the Circle, an interdimensional group pulled together to fend off various threats on multiple worlds. Already taken from a point in canon where he’s begun to slowly question his role as a deviant hunter, while simultaneously fearing the consequences of failure, Connor took his new “mission” to heart — believing that if he performed well and was successful in the task set before them, they would all be able to return home. He would be able to continue his real mission from there, when the time came; as a result, he was able to set aside these self-doubts by delegating them to the back of his mind. He clung to the idea of being a machine able to perform a task and to perform it well, and his plan was to abide by that for as long as possible.

The CR he developed during that time, however, made it easier said than done. Amicable by his very nature, Connor was quick to make a circle of close friends; many of them questioned his explanations regarding why androids were not meant to feel, and why deviant androids were simply housing errors and nothing more. He deflected these answers with his usual spiel, but over time it became more difficult to keep up the facade — on more than one occasion, he couldn’t always hide his empathy, or his fear, or any other myriad of emotions that could be explained away as anything other than that: genuine emotion.

There were a few particularly close friends that Connor had divulged his uncertainties to, and even his fear of being deactivated if he failed his mission, or admitted his skew towards deviancy. But to him, who had not yet crossed the line into accepting that he was a person, not yet getting over the fear of this wide chasm of change just on the horizon, this unwanted consequence was only a reason for why he had to remain the same. A machine.

Throughout the months he remained in Acatalepsy, he never quite stepped over the threshold of his growing denial, but there is no question: it is growing. He’s self-aware enough to realize that, and while the promise of having a job to complete still hangs over his head, his continued closeness with friends and acquaintances alike had still allowed those seeds of doubts to germinate in his head. Connor’s state in-game would reflect this, and depending upon his interactions with others in Prismatica, this while likely continue for the foreseeable future — until something has to give way, for better or worse.

PERSONALITY:

First impressions of Connor are not too far off the mark — he presents himself as articulate and well-put together, thoughtful and often approaching any given situation with a careful amount of consideration. He is much like what he was created to be: a machine made to interact closely with humans, in both sound, appearance, and demeanor. As a result, Connor has been carefully tailored to be generally pleasing to interact with. He is oftentimes polite and straightforward, and at the beginning of the narrative, relies heavily upon reasoning and rationale to interact with others and inform most of his decisions. Yet this very literal way of thinking can slowly transition into an oblivious awkwardness from him, seen often in his rather lacking attempts at making idle conversation. He is, in that way, a bit of a walking paradox — he was made to aid with investigations and negotiate with others. As one might expect from an android created with this purpose in mind, he can easily read the body language and minute ticks of individuals to gauge their reactions and emotions accordingly. So, knowing how to proceed in, say, the interrogation room is something he can do with ease. The pressure of high-intensity situations very rarely affects his focus, and in moments where the stakes are highest, Connor pushes through with an edge of a stubborn streak not usually seen in normal conversation.

Yet it is passing conversation where these skills seem to peter out and die. Reading a room remains easy for him, but the delicate nuances of not overstepping boundaries — wanting to ask “personal questions”, for example, where such a thing would be expected in the realm of police work — is a little more difficult for him. If Connor wonders about something, he asks to clarify, or if he observes something, he rarely hesitates to let it be known. This is not always appreciated from whomever he’s conversing with, and the larger the issue, the more inflated his tendency to solve perceived problems becomes. For example, to aid his partner Hank Anderson (whom he sees passed out through a window from a hard night of drinking), he breaks into his house and literally slaps him awake, then drags him to the bathroom, dumps him into the tub, and turns the shower on him. Effective, but not particularly subtle. Quick, but not garnering any favors from the man as a result. Needless to say, it is this facet of his personality that sometimes leaves Connor in the wake of awkward interactions, crafted by his own hand.

Yet Connor is not just a polite, observant android who sometimes can’t carry a casual conversation. He has a stubborn streak, reflected in his frequent declarations that all he does is for the sake of his mission, and to problem-solve accordingly is a consequence of his willful personality, hidden beneath polite mannerisms. His prerogative (for most of the story; more on this later) is to complete the mission assigned to him, and Connor has a habit of latching onto a purpose, a goal, to properly see it through to the end — as he was meant to do. To derive information from those withholding it, he has been shown to be aggressive in his interrogations, speaking forcefully and prying with question after question, seeing what will stick and what isn’t effective. He has been known to use firearms with deadly accuracy, firing with little hesitation. He chases an escaping deviant on-foot over rooftops and moving trains, calculating which routes would be better to take the whole while, unflinching when met with different environmental hazards along the way. All of this lends to the perception that he is indeed just a calculating machine, making empirical decisions based on what will prove the most advantageous as a whole.

This isn’t completely true either.

While Connor does begin the story in a relatively neutral state, more analytical and shunning the idea that androids are truly capable of emotion and empathy, this increasingly begins to not be the case. In fact, it is in the very first mission that we see a foreshadowing of this: when Connor decides to save a fish that had fallen out of its tank, for no reason other than he could. Slowly, this showing of empathy begins to become more prominent — saving Hank more than once (even if it proved detrimental to the case at hand), hesitating before shooting another fleeing deviant, refusing to kill an innocent android simply because he was promised useful information if he did. Connor is, at his core, an individual who already possessed the ingrained ability to empathize with others, a tiny facet that when given the chance to germinate, becomes a solidified part of his personality. He experiences emotions (though he would claim otherwise up until near the end of the story), shown through various interactions with others; frustration at an on-going case being swept out from under them, a sense of unexpectedly wry humor edged in sarcasm that sometimes peeks through the formality, appearing shaken after experiencing another android’s death, and the hesitant admission to Hank that he is afraid to "die".

Yet his stubborn adherence to the belief that he is only a machine created to serve a purpose (and therefore avoiding becoming deviant, the very thing that he was created to hunt down) becomes a point of contention and internal conflict for Connor. Emotions and empathy made manifest within him are impossible to truly ignore, and even his partner is quick to point out these changes, further fueling his growing uncertainty. It's easy, after all, to adhere to what one was created to do; there's purpose in knowing that, there's a strict adherence to an indelible rule that is difficult to pull away from. To accept that the truth is not so straightforward, and that he himself is an example of this, is a difficult pill to swallow. It is an existential crisis that he struggles to come to terms with, but eventually does cross that threshold later in the timeline -- by accepting his more human qualities, in an admission of the fact that he is, indeed, alive.


POWERS/ABILITIES: Another wiki link!

INVENTORY:
—an American currency quarter, issued 1994
—a basic combat knife (given to him in Acata)

MOONBLESSING: Sanguis

SAMPLES

link #1
link #2