Fade Rift Application

[youwonscience]

RIFTER APPLICATION

PLAYER

Name: Ammmy
Age: 30+
Contact: prettiestwhistles/DM character journal
Other Characters: none
Interests: I would love to cultivate some complex long-term CR, whether friendly or "professional." I'm into piecing together information over time and working out things that are initially mysterious. I also occasionally just enjoy silly slice-of-life, though it's not my primary driver.

CHARACTER

Name: Cosima Niehaus
Canon/OC: Orphan Black
Canon Point: End of season one
Journal: youwonscience
Age: 30ish (born 1984; season one presumably takes place around 2013, the year it aired, though it isn't specified)

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, not all of which the show has fully revealed, 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 have connections to the "neolutionism" community, the members of which believe human evolution should be actively shaped by scientific and technological intervention.

Project Leda - The Dyad project that created Cosima and her fellow clones (24 have been identified at this point). The project was headed by scientists Ethan and Susan Duncan.

"Topside" - a private corporation, real name unknown, which is the parent organization for Dyad. It also has ties to Project Leda and a military cloning project codenamed "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.

Cosima transferred to the Experimental Evolutionary Developmental Biology program at the University of Minnesota, both for access to the program's resources and to be geographically closer to Toronto, where both Beth and fellow clone Alison Hendrix lived. Cosima broke up with her girlfriend, believing long distance to be unsustainable, but later found out that the woman had been her "monitor," a plant sent by the Dyad Institute to periodically measure her vitals and report on her behavior.

Beth was in the process of attempting to secure hair and blood samples from some of the sick clones for Cosima to study when she fell out of contact. Cosima, increasingly worried, repeatedly called her; when she finally answered, Beth revealed that a fellow clone had been shot in front of her, substantiating suspicions that someone wanted the clones dead. Cosima urged Beth to keep the samples safe.

However, it turned out this conversation wasn't with Beth, but with Sarah Manning, a clone who had assumed Beth's identity after seeing Beth commit suicide. Sarah's ignorance of the situation risked drawing attention, so Cosima, with Alison's reluctant help, explained as much as they knew. Despite the dangers of the situation, Cosima encouraged Sarah to keep posing as Beth, in order to use police access to learn more about the person killing clones.

Cosima returned to Minnesota with the samples. She met a suspiciously friendly fellow student - Delphine Cormier - to whom she was (inconveniently) attracted despite her inclination not to trust her. Cosima decided to pursue a friendship in the name of observing her presumed replacement monitor, but the two began to fall for one another.

Their relationship was, indeed, a pretext; Delphine used her access to Cosima's living space to find out what Cosima knew and report back to Dyad. Cosima found out. Hurt and angry, she headed to Toronto to get away from Delphine and support her sisters. When she arrived, Dr. Aldous Leekie of the Dyad Institute offered her a deal: agree to regular, noninvasive checkups and in return, receive her own genome sequence and a job at Dyad. Despite her personal disdain for Leekie, Cosima accepted in hopes of securing some answers about her own existence. It is shortly after she accepts that she comes through a rift.

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.

Due to the revelations about her past in the year or so prior to her canonpoint, Cosima is perhaps hypersensitive to deception. She has been lied to about fundamental facts of her existence by a variety of people, and while this hasn't yet erased her ability to trust new people, it has made her very leery of giving anyone she catches in a lie a second chance.

This reluctance is despite - or, from another angle, possibly because of - the fact that 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.)

Given her illness, she is fundamentally afraid she is running out of time. She tends to cope with this, and indeed with most of 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. (Not that she'll have the equipment, colleagues or time to do much of that in Thedas, but she thoroughly understands the scientific method, which may still be helpful.) 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; 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. In fact, she's never really been in anything resembling a physical altercation. On top of that, she's ill; she is developing symptoms of a genetic disorder that means she can never have children, and that has also been attacking her respiratory system, occasionally causing her to cough up blood. She's knows it's degenerative and potentially fatal, but has no good idea of the progression or the time frame she's working with.

Her eyeliner game may actually be supernatural.

A note about her illness:
My best-case scenario with Cosima's health is to use it as a CR building block of some sort. If it's plausible, it'd be nice if something Thedas-specific eased or cured the symptoms without giving her any way to create an analogue for it when/if she goes home. This could be either something that happens once, or something that she'll need to re-up periodically (a potion/poultice/etc.). If you want to handwave that she's simply asymptomatic for the duration of her time in Thedas, I'm open to that too, but it's a second choice.

Arrival Inventory

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


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


• Prescription eyeglasses


• Blue latex gloves


• Wallet, keys


• 2 iPhones, one in a standard black case and one in a hot pink case


• Portable, Pax-style vaporizer


• 2 ballpoint pens

'Human'ization

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

Fit

Apping this particular character, I am interested in both a mix of character/emotion-driven arcs and investigative, find-shit-out projects for her. Cosima is not very well equipped to participate in intrigue, but is good at observing others' actions and could easily end up very heavily invested behind the scenes, which I'd enjoy (though that obviously won't happen right off the bat with a rifter). I think the combination of her personable nature and her inherent curiosity will make her an ideal character for exploring Thedas as an outsider. She could also be an extremely helpful ally to a character more prone to action than research; this is one of her major dynamics in her source material and would be a fun parallel to explore.

SAMPLES

SAMPLE ONE

Cosima is absolutely not going to be daunted by the amount of hiking involved in coming to Thedas.

She's certainly read enough adventure stories - even enough regular history - to know that modes of life other than North America in the early 21st century involved a lot of getting to one place by putting one foot in front of the other. She could have dreamed herself some slightly more practical footwear than the Doc Martens, she allows, as she frees one of them from the mud with a squelching sound. But it could have been worse.

(Could have been a sex dream. She wonders if anyone's ever arrived through a rift naked. She'll ask one day, when she's reasonably sure she knows she won't offend by asking.)

Mud aside, walking isn't totally unpleasant. The landscape is unfamiliar, but she's always liked being out in nature. Distance is certainly more daunting, however, when you take cars out of the equation. And she doesn't mind being sent out scouting for elfroot - she could use the practice in recognizing it in the wild, now that she's seen it dried. She's not a botanist, but even the little she knows of its properties is enough to be intriguing.

But walking involves actively putting out of her mind the question as to whether she's just short of breath because she spent too much time behind a microscope at home or because of something more sinister. And with no one to distract her, she's going to need something else to occupy her mind.

She settles on the very scientific option of seeing if she can remember all the words to "Be Our Guest." She's got a lot of '90s Disney songs she can work through, and if she runs out, there's always TMBG to fall back on. It beats wondering what the people she left behind are assuming happened to her.

SAMPLE TWO

Falling asleep on beautiful women is all part of the plan.