I am a free man (Systemwide Application)

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OOC

Name: Ammmy
Age: 29
Contact details: PM this journal | prettiestwhistles | plus5vswords AT gmail
Characters already in Systemwide: none

BASIC PROFILE

Name: Emily Finch
Age: 29
Canon: original character
Appearance: Played by Rachel Weisz; while character is in her late 20s, she routinely plays a bit older or younger in her Matrix-life.
Extraction point: Emily was in the middle of an undercover operation in Belarus, related to her world’s equivalent of the Russian Woodpecker when she was extracted.

OVERVIEW

Personality:

In the world Emily knew as real, she always felt like an outsider. When she was young, she and her father were set apart by their supernatural talents and somewhat by choice, given his propensity to keep to himself and her propensity to follow his lead. When she was a teenager, her father chose to ship her an ocean away to a place where she was an outsider due to her nationality, her accent, and her social class. While Emily enjoys company and truly thrives on being around other people, this early isolation stuck, and she never quite shook the sense of being not quite like everyone else.

Perhaps ironically, this aloofness is part of what made her so good at her job as a spy. Even before she was trained in clandestine operations, Emily was a skillful little mimic, quick to pick up and reflect back outward signifiers that mark her as one of the in-group, just like you (or maybe a little better). These signifiers can range from overt, such as an accent or a style of dress, to more subtle things such as body language or the amount of eye contact she makes. Through both natural inclination and training, Emily became quite skilled at reading someone to see what would put them at ease and then packaging herself to fit that role. It was something that was equally useful to her in cultivating peers at an English boarding school and in cultivating sources in Eastern Europe years later. A variety of people have thought they were Emily's best friend over the years; nearly every single one of them was wrong.

While her alienation proved useful, it was not entirely a boon. It also has resulted in an ongoing sense of loneliness. This is, in part, of the reason she’s never accepted that her father’s death was real. After nearly 12 years, many people would have probably let it go, even though a body was never found, but her father was one of the only people Emily ever fully trusted (despite the fact he clearly withheld information about his past from her, as well as information about why and how he sent her to England). Several people who care for her have suggested that her continued efforts to find out what happened to him are simply a means of avoiding coping with his loss; Emily chooses to interpret these concerns as, at best, misplaced, and the fact she feels set apart already makes it easier for her to shake them off.

Emily has generalized problems with trust and intimacy too. She’s not pathologically unable to trust - she mainly trusted Atkinson, the woman who trained her; she more or less trusted her handlers and colleagues; and she had people she genuinely considered friends. But even those she loved most couldn’t be fully relied upon. Emily strongly felt, first and foremost, she needed to take care of herself because no one else would. When she lost a close colleague in a job in Prague, she mourned her fairly openly. In contrast, when another colleague turned out to be a double agent whose defection nearly got her killed, several people remarked upon how little she seemed outwardly shaken by the incident. She reacted to the betrayal not as a loss, but as an unavoidable hazard of having to work any way other than alone.

Meeting Emily, however, would not give the impression of a distrustful woman - certainly not at first, even if she were not on a job or in character as someone else. In social situations, Emily is bright, witty but not overbearing, and more than a bit of a flirt. She likes parties and legitimately got a thrill from the more dangerous parts of her job. While she wasn’t indifferent to the politics involved - she did feel she was on the “right” side of the Cold War inasmuch as one existed - they weren’t her primary motive for the way she threw herself into her career. She was not a person who relished long stretches of quiet or solitude, and was supremely bad at ever using leave.

She also showed a perhaps surprising level of loyalty, considering that she did not truly expect anyone to demonstrate an equal loyalty to her. For Emily, the two things aren’t connected. For someone who spends so much of her life playing a part, she deeply values her word when it’s given in earnest, and she meets her commitments. This is partly a value her father instilled in her, and partly an outgrowth of her natural stubbornness. For all she seems a hedonist on the surface, she’s a workaholic underneath. To her bosses’ general aggravation, her code of conduct is internally dictated; she has more than once disobeyed orders, though never in a big enough way to lose her job. Yet her commitment to her internal code is strong. She would be deceptively hard to crack, were someone trying, considering her mix of commitment to her cause and self-contained mode of operation.

Her hardworking nature isn’t entirely obligation, either. Emily thrives on having things to do. She knows this about herself and, in fact, wondered in the early days of her career whether her father’s death was staged specifically in order to get her to accept an opportunity she had been hesitant to take, because it was preferable to sitting down and properly grieving him. (Probable, she thinks, but she never did prove it.) Either way, Emily would always rather be doing something than nothing, even if the something is a badly planned mission or work toward a questionable goal. She can be patient, when she needs to be, but her inclination for movement has gotten her into trouble in the past when it pushed her into acting prematurely or taking bigger risks than she probably should.

Emily has not been extracted long, but feels mostly unmoored, so far. Her inherent distrustful nature means that it has been hard for her to start over, essentially from scratch, surrounded by strangers without any points of reference to guide her. That said, her dislike of solitude is likely to drive her to form at least tenuous bonds sooner than later; she is not inclined to sit alone, doing nothing, for very long at all.

Matrix:
The history of Emily’s matrix started out similar to the “real” history of contemporary Earth, but with a very slight nudge toward the supernatural. Vampires or fairies are generally scoffed at as hoaxes, but by Emily’s era, most everyone knows for a fact that witches and sorcerers, while relatively rare, do exist. Ancient curses: very plausible. Werewolves: no one has heard of any, but the theory at least is reasonably sound. Super Powers: no one is talking about them in those terms, but definitely. There aren’t any completely non-human magical creatures, at least as far as anyone has proven, but magic is widely believed in, and even decently understood in certain high circles of knowledge and power. Emily’s world is loosely based on the puplier pop culture representations of Cold War espionage with these fantastical elements folded in - think more classic James Bond than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

At Emily’s extraction, it’s 1978 and the world is in the midst of a Cold War entering an uneasy détente. Rather than nuclear weapons, however, this arms race has been to control and understand magic in widespread weaponized forms. The US-Canada-UK alliance that jointly ended WWII by unleashing three sorcerers on Tokyo and four on Berlin (though the official story was somewhat more full of bombs and heroic raids and less mind control and melting through bunker doors) has held for the past few decades, though not without some strain. Stalin, furious that Russia had been kept out of the war-ending attacks, broke off diplomatic relations with America and the UK; it was shortly revealed that he’d created a panel of magical advisers of his own - seven witches, whose power was rumored to be enormous. After Stalin’s death, word on the street was that the witches were effectively running the country, and that Khrushchev was anything from one of their lovers to a homunculus they made out of clay. Nearly no one can claim to know for sure, though it is known that his enemies within the Party have had no traction.

Emily herself is American, born in the Bronx, 1948. She was raised by her father, a car mechanic named Thomas, and knew nothing about her mother beyond the fact that she was dead. She had no extended family, as far as she knew; it was just her and her dad, but they were very close. As she grew, she suspected there was some secret about her father’s past - something they’d specifically run away from - but her attempts to find out indirectly were fruitless and she knew better than to directly ask. He did eventually let her know he’d once been a private investigator, but didn’t want to discuss any details.

Once she was old enough to understand, he began teaching her about her special powers, which she had inherited from him: both how to use them and how to keep them hidden from others. Things just fell into place for both Finches, and that wasn’t a crime, but being actively supernatural could draw the wrong kind of attention. (See the anomalies section for details; the “wrong kind of attention,” in hindsight, could have meant Agents.)

When Emily was 14, her father informed her that he was sending her to school in England. Out of the blue, this came as quite a shock. For one thing, she’d had no idea he had that sort of money available. For another, she protested loudly the idea of being so far away from him. He, however, could and did make her go, and she resented it a great deal.

Soon after she arrived, a woman named Ms. Atkinson got in touch; she was a friend of Emily’s late uncle, who had died in France in WWII. Peggy had been assigned to his aviation unit due to her ability to influence air currents. Thomas, knowing Emily had talents beyond his own, had gotten in touch and asked Atkinson to train her in use of them.

So, during her public school education in England, Emily also learned about her ability to manipulate and influence metal, a power her father didn’t share. During her school years, she lost her Bronx accent; her ear was quite good, and while she normally favored a more upper-crust American lilt, she could easily pass for English with strangers if she chose. She also convinced Atkinson to let her learn to handle a gun, and showed an immediate knack for firearms. (She’d long ago learned how to fight with knives, as Thomas believed luck alone - even supernatural luck - was no self-defense plan.)

It turned out that lessons with Atkinson were also something of a test. Atkinson was working with MI6, and the combination of Emily’s supernatural talent, her adaptability and her intelligence meant that she was soon being groomed as much as trained. When she was 17, Emily was approached by a joint department, with members in both MI6 and the CIA, that focused on using supernatural abilities for espionage. Emily hesitated to take something that would keep her so far away from her father. However, while she was hesitating over her career offer, she received word that her father had abruptly died under questionable circumstances.

Angry and grieving, she took the job. She spent six months in training, a year and a half in supervised field work, and has been a full agent for going on a decade by her extraction point. She speaks several languages fluently and has a reputation for being particularly ruthless when the job requires. They never found her father’s body, and she has quietly spent part of her time travelling the globe in efforts to find out what happened to him.

Given the pulpy nature of this matrix, there would be many potential ins for Agents, including enemy spies, military agents or even rogue sorcerers or superpowered individuals unaligned with any particular government. There is a lot of inherent flexibility.

Real World:

Emily’s a relatively recent extract, only about 10 to 12 weeks out. She’s more or less done with physical therapy, but she’s still getting her feet under her in any way that really matters. So far, her mode of operation has largely been silent observation, though she’ll interact if someone initiates the conversation.



ABILITIES AND SKILLS

Anomalies:

In her home matrix, Emily had two superhuman abilities. First, and in her mind foremost, she influenced probability fields in her favor. Though it happened at a low-level naturally - she’s never lost a coin toss in her life unless she wanted to - she could “push” the ability in order to try and secure a more unlikely result. However, if she pushed too hard, the ability occasionally backfired, making the odds tilt against her instead. Generally, she saved this ability for dire situations, as it tended to draw the attention of empaths and other magic users (potentially Agents) if she used it too liberally. Basically, she had cheat codes for the real world, but if she tried to overreach, the rules snapped back in her face. Given that this ability was very rare, it was potentially a glitch, not a designed feature of her matrix.

In addition, she had an affinity for metal, allowing her to manipulate it with an exercise of will. Physically smaller objects were easier for her to manipulate; she was very good with bullets, knives, and locks. She could sometimes manage bigger things or focus on component parts of bigger things, too. For example, she couldn’t stop a tank, but given a few moments of focus, she could probably bend the barrel of its main gun so it wouldn’t fire or, if she were familiar with the model, could shift parts of the engine so it would break down abruptly. She was much less shy about this ability than her other one; her bosses knew about it, as did some of her longstanding enemies. It is much more in line with the sorts of abilities that turn up throughout her world.

She was told she had the capability to learn the sort of magic one can pick up from study, but she never had the time or interest to actually do so.

Skillset:

Emily is a trained field agent in a world where spycraft includes things like jumping out of airplanes while wearing collapsible skis. Her main skills include skilled use of firearms; knife throwing; basic levels of athleticism (running, climbing, swimming etc.) under conditions where one is being shot at or otherwise unduly stressed; languages (fluent in English, French, and Russian, conversational in German, excellent ear for accents); driving, especially while trying to lose a tail or being chased; seduction; lying, lying and so much more lying.

Upload Capabilities:

Anomalous Skills: 4
Martial Arts: 1
Projectile Weaponry: 2
Technical Skills: 0
Wild Card: 3

SAMPLES

Sample One

Emily almost laughs when she realizes that her fleeting thought is wrong. It hasn’t been a long time since she’s been in New York. She’s never been in New York, because New York doesn’t exist. (Anymore?) But she keeps a straight face all the same.

It’s remarkably like a job, she finds. Her knowledge of things like smartphones and how to pay for a cab with a credit card feels strange, like a new weapon carried somewhere she wasn’t yet used to. But more generally looking like she belonged while tailing someone while not letting the someone notice… that was very familiar indeed.

The other thing that was familiar was how to radiate “native New Yorker,” she finds, despite the differences in New York itself. She has sunglasses and earpieces like a transistor radio’s in both ears (earbuds, she knows, but only by upload). Yet what really sells it is the facial expression. I’m much too important to tell you how to get to Rockefeller Center. I have better things to do than explain the Subway. Catcall me and I’ll mace you.

That last one didn’t always work, granted, but unlike a lot of women, she’d be happy to actually do it if she weren’t busy.

The man turns a corner a little too quickly, and Emily silently curses to herself. Has she been made, or is he just paranoid? She has a split second until the question answers itself; he re-emerges, doubling back, but doesn’t give her any particular attention, nor does he avoid her. Paranoid, then. She doesn’t break stride - she’ll need to cut over a block if she doesn’t want to risk his notice.

It isn’t until the car screeches to a halt beside her and the door flies open that she registers anything has gone wrong. Before the driver can shout “Get in!” a hail of bullets manages - just - not to hit her.

The colorful hail of cursing and shouts among the panic are also very New York, she thinks. As she dives into the car, she almost feels at home.


Sample Two

Take a picture.