Fade Rift Re-App

[youwonscience]

PLAYER

Name: Ammmy
Age: Old
Contact: prettiestwhistles/ prettiestwhistles#5125 @ Discord
Other Characters: Julius, Ket Perrino, Romain de Coucy (side), Vanya Orlov (side)
Interests: Look, mainly I want to crash into Science Club like a wrecking ball, but ALSO it's been a few years and the mix of Riftwatch agents has changed up a lot. I think it'd be fun to have her return.

CHARACTER

Name: Cosima Niehaus
Canon/OC: Orphan Black
Canon Point: End of the series (an update from her last appearance)
Journal: youwonscience
Age: ~33

Canon World

The world of Orphan Black is, on the surface, more or less the same as contemporary Earth (e.g. Cosima was old enough to vote for John Kerry and be intensely depressed that George W. Bush was re-elected). However, there have been major advances in science of which the general public is unaware. Of primary interest to Cosima's story is that viable human cloning experiments were carried out as early as the mid-1980s.

Carrying out such technologically advanced work was a combination of international organizations including a private research company, at least one paramilitary organization and a shadowy organization that oversees both. Orphan Black also features minor differences from our world typical of its genre, such as plot-convenient hacking and variably competent law enforcement, but the cloning project and related scientific offshoots are the most salient differences.

Major organizations salient to Cosima's backstory:

The Dyad Institute - a private organization, considered "fringe" by the mainstream scientific community, devoted to research related to human evolution and biotechnology. Some of its many employees had connections to the "neolutionism" community, the members of which believed human evolution should be actively shaped by scientific and technological intervention.

Project Leda - The Dyad project that created Cosima and her fellow clones (274 originally, though at least 18 have died by Cosima's canon point). The project was headed by scientists Ethan and Susan Duncan, both now deceased.

"Topside" - a private corporation, real name unknown, which was the parent organization for Dyad. It also had ties to Project Leda and a military cloning project code-named "Castor."

History

Cosima Niehaus was born in San Francisco in 1984. As a child, she was unaware of her unusual origins, though she did know her parents had resorted to IVF. A smart and studious kid, Cosima excelled at school and was drawn to science, specifically biology, from an early age. After completing her undergraduate studies, she began her doctorate at U.C. Berkeley. During this time she was contacted by a fellow clone, Canadian police officer Beth Childs, who had tracked her down using facial recognition technology. Beth broke the news that Cosima was a clone, and asked for her help; many of their fellow clones were falling victim a mysterious and, in some cases, terminal illness.

After that, five seasons of television happened, but the major highlights included:

• Cosima transferred to the University of Minnesota where she met Delphine Cormier, a doctor posing as a fellow grad student to monitor her. They fell in love, broke up, Cosima briefly thought Delphine was dead, and they got back together again. Like you do.



• She met several of her fellow clones, and grew especially close to Alison Hendrix and Sarah Manning as all of them tried to find a way to survive.



• She met the scientists who made her and her sisters and found the experience profoundly disappointing.



• Cosima finally found a cure for the disease affecting her and many of her sister clones. Once the forces trying to control them were defeated, in some cases through violence and in others through exposure, Delphine and Cosima started on a world tour to distribute the cure to clones worldwide, using a full list handed over by their former opponent (and fellow clone) Rachel Duncan. She is on this world tour when she returns to Thedas.

Fan wiki entry


Personality

Cosima is temperamentally laid back, and tends to believe that most (though not all) people are fundamentally trying to do their best under whatever circumstances they're operating. Her go-to mode in a conflict is trying to empathize and see other points of view. As such, she's an instinctive nurturer, good with kids and inclined to form friendships with people different from her (and one another).

That said, she won't back down from a fight if she knows the other person is wrong. Cosima has a strong moral center, especially where her work is concerned; she has no patience for people who hurt others, actively or through negligence, in pursuit of their own gain. Her generally "go with the flow" personality evaporates in the face of what she sees as someone abusing a position of power.

Cosima is extremely loyal to her friends and family. While she is not a rebel for its own sake, she has no problem bending or ignoring rules she thinks are arbitrary in favor of the needs of people she cares about. She is more than willing to go out of her way if she is able to help someone close to her, even if doing so is ultimately to her own detriment. (In fairness, she's also willing to dispense with rules if they stand between her and answers to her questions.)

Cosima tends to cope with her fears by learning as much about a situation as she can. Beyond curiosity and work as coping strategies, she also has a bit of a hedonistic streak; Cosima likes sex and isn't shy about liking it. But connecting with others socially in any way helps, whether board games with friends or a dancing with her sisters. She is aware of a tendency to live too much in her head, and actively reaches for other people (and for marijuana and wine) to ground herself.

While able to adapt on the fly, Cosima is fundamentally a planner. This is somewhat temperamental, but her professional interests certainly encourage it; she prefers to observe, ideally at length, before taking action. She tends to believe that emotion and intellect ideally temper one another in making decisions, but if push comes to shove, she favors intellect as the more trustworthy framework. She trusts her gut, but her gut usually says "wait and see."



Strengths & Weaknesses

Cosima is extremely intelligent and has had extensive training in evolutionary biology. Beyond her training, Cosima has a demonstrated ability for quickly synthesizing disparate pieces of information and creating plausible theories to fill in the gaps. This has served her in everything from complicated, European-style board games to fighting off shadowy organizations trying to kill her and her sister clones in her home world; it will almost certainly prove useful in a range of situations in between.

Her emotional intelligence is also reasonably high. Cosima is friendly, personable and laid back, though not afraid to be blunt if angered. She's a good observer of people and a loyal friend once her friendship is earned. She is, however, not an adept liar and not much of a schemer; she tends to rely on her smarts, her kindness and her ability to stand up for herself, and pretty much never attempts (and would be bad at) manipulation that relies on more overt deception than lies of omission. While many of the clones have posed as one another at various junctures, Cosima is arguably the worst at it.

Nor is Cosima much use in a physical capacity. She's a lover, not a fighter, and has no weapons skills at all. While she's no longer ill, she hasn't gotten substantially better at fighting since her last venture to Thedas. (She did, however, blind an opponent with a pencil, so given enough time to build a machine, she can do A Violence if necessary.)

Her eyeliner game may actually be supernatural.

A note about her illness: Given the nature of rifters, I thought I'd touch base here. By her new canon point, she's been cured of her illness and doesn't require further treatment for it. However, I'm also OK with a scenario where she returns to Thedas with her illness at the same level it was the first time she was here (and treatable the same way), if that makes more sense under the circumstances.

Suggested Nerfs

n/a

Arrival Inventory

• Outfit - Undergarments, jeans, tank top, long-sleeved t-shirt, ankle boots


• Several bracelets, an elastic hair tie worn as a bracelet and a large (costume jewelry) ring


• Prescription eyeglasses


• Wallet, keys


• iPhone


• Portable, Pax-style vaporizer


• 2 ballpoint pens


• Bottle of merlot, unopened

Humanization

Unnecessary; while a clone, Cosima is fully human for the purposes of the game.

Fit

I originally dropped Cosima because I'd been playing her for a long time continuously and I hit a point where she'd lost a lot of her established relationships and her work felt a bit repetitive. Bringing her back now appeals, in part, because the mixture of characters has been so shuffled that it's easy for me to see potential avenues for her to bond with people in the game and for those connections to tie into new in-game projects. Also, I think by jumping her forward a bit in canon, she'll be coming in with a different set of concerns and experiences, which will also inform how she comes back. If she comes back cured, her illness will necessarily be less central to playing her than it was; if she comes back and finds herself ill again, her relationship to it will be different knowing that a cure is possible (or at least was in her native world). I also think going and coming back will be an interesting perspective for her among other rifters.

Also I miss looking at her face.

SAMPLES

1. "It seems like even just, statistics would send us somewhere boring eventually."


2. "Welcome to Thedas. I heard you got a shittier than average introduction."