App for TLV

[kineticpotential]

User Name/Nick: PG
User DW: quantumvelvet
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: PM, quantumvelvet
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Yelena Belova

Character Name: Remy LeBeau/Gambit
Series: X-Men '97
Age: 30 (This is an estimate, since his age is never actually given in the series - he's very firmly an adult, but everything else is nebulous.)
From When?: After his death in S1E05 of X-Men '97 (plus a couple of years aboard the Narrenschiff)

Warden Justification: Remy is a fundamentally decent man who's spent a solid chunk of his adult life fighting to defend people who frequently would not return the favour if the tables were turned. He, like most of Xavier's students, believes that the world can be improved, that people can learn to be better than their worst, and that these are goals worth working toward.

He's also a (mostly) reformed thief. While he never went through the inmate graduation process on the Barge, he's nevertheless familiar with what redemption looks like from the inside - the struggle to unlearn old patterns, to decide how much of your old self to keep, to learn to trust people, to weather the distrust from people who know your background. He understands that redemption is a process, not an end goal, and he will bring that experience and that empathy to his role as a warden.

Item: A metal Ace of Spades playing card

Abilities/Powers: Remy has the ability to charge and detonate non-living matter by converting its potential energy to kinetic energy. He needs to have direct physical contact with an item in order to use this power. While he typically prefers to use small objects - his favourite being his ever-present playing cards - because it's faster, less draining, and more practical, he has charged something as large as a carrier aircraft. He has some control over the power of the detonation, having used similar items to cause explosions on par with a grenade, and explosions with just enough force to stun a person, and has the ability to cancel the charge prior to detonation as long as he remains in physical contact with the object. While he has no real formal education, he has an innate understanding of force and potential energy, and how to gauge it.

(As a note, the comic version of Gambit has a broader powerset that's been upgraded several times, and has the ability to psionically influence people to believe and agree with him as a secondary power. Since these abilities were never shown in either the original X-Men TAS run or in '97, I'm operating under the assumption that they don't apply to this version of Remy.)

Remy is an expert in Savate and Bojutsu, and has excellent aim with thrown weapons, both formal and improvised. He's highly skilled in stealth, physical infiltration, and sleight of hand, and is a gifted liar and manipulator. He's highly perceptive in both physical and social contexts, extremely intelligent, and good at thinking on his feet, adapting, and strategizing.

Wardening Strategies and Philosophies: Remy's approach to being a warden is best summed up by two descriptions of him given by people to whom he was particularly close. From Kurt, that he's a man who can see the potential in other people, and from Rogue, that he knows how to take what's important from the past and carry it forward into the future. His view of redemption isn't complete transformation. He won't expect any inmate under his care to come out the other side a completely different person, and will push back hard against anyone who insists that's a desirable outcome, let alone a viable one. Instead, he'll be inclined to work with them to figure out who they have the potential to be at their best (or at their least worst), and help them find the tools they need to reach that potential - and, crucially, how to re-purpose the tools and lessons they already have. While he'll want his inmate to succeed, he won't expect them to do so on any particular timeline, and won't push - or will course-correct and back off - on issues they aren't ready to address unless there's a crisis.

Remy isn't a fan of hard control, and is inclined to give the inmates under his care a decent amount of leeway if they aren't being actively destructive (or self-destructive). That said, he's very good at reading people, and is difficult to con and manipulate, so inmates who are likely to cause serious trouble might find themselves under much closer scrutiny than they would anticipate or realize, given his outwardly laissez-faire demeanour. Given Remy's a gambler at heart, and believes in giving people enough rope to hang themselves, he's likely to let someone play out their schemes to a certain point while setting things in motion to block them rather than shutting them down right from the outset. It's possible this may backfire on him at some point, but like all good gamblers, he knows when something's a calculated risk.

Remy is fiercely loyal to the people he cares about, and this will almost certainly apply to any permanent inmate he winds up assigned to. While he won't hesitate to call them on their shit, he'll also be a fierce advocate for his inmate, both in terms of getting them privileges he thinks they've earned, and in terms of shooting down punishments he deems too harsh. He understands trust issues, and is willing to put in the work to show his inmate that he's in their corner.

Given his own background, Remy would do particularly well with someone who wants to break away from a dubious past, but is struggling with how to do that, with the fear of always being judged for their past, or with a sense of futility because they don't think they can make up for prior misdeeds. He would also do well with someone whose crimes are a result of lashing out against injustice and structural inequality, particularly but not solely as a result of prejudice.

On the flip side, he'd do poorly with someone whose crimes are a result of their own prejudice against a specific group or groups. Given he died in an attempted genocide, he's unlikely to be able to look past his own trauma and connect to and work with someone who inflicted harm on that basis. On a much less fraught level, he's also not the ideal permanent warden for someone who straight up doesn't want redemption or to go through the graduation process (as opposed to just not believing they're capable). While he'd make a decent and attentive temporary warden for such a person, he doesn't believe in controlling people, or that people can be forced into redeeming themselves, so he's unlikely to give someone who's truly recalcitrant the hard shove they need.

Remy also won't be the ideal warden for someone who needs hard restrictions kept on their powers, but who would ICly want those limits removed. He understands the need to keep people from murdering everyone on the ship, but would balk at keeping someone cut off from their powers unless at their request, and would be more likely to restore them with some modifications to reduce the ability to do harm.

Remy's time aboard the Narrenschiff will serve him well in adapting to life aboard the Barge. While floods and breaches were less common there, he has had some experience with them - in addition the the vast array of experience with Weird Shit that came with being an X-Man - and has become accustomed to working with people from a wide range of worlds and realities. The biggest culture shock will be the warden/inmate divide, and it will take him some time to acclimate to that. It has the potential to cause some friction in certain circumstances if he considers the difference in treatment between wardens and inmates unnecessary or unfair.

His time aboard the Narrenschiff has also given him a keen understanding of the sense of futility and despair that knowing you're dead can cause, and with just how much someone can justify in the name of survival. This is both something he's going to be grappling with for a while himself, and something he'll be on the look out for with the inmates he deals with.

Deal: For any weapons, including bioweapons, present or future, using or built around targeting of the X-gene to be inoperable.

History: Here

Remy also spent a couple of years aboard the Narrenschiff, as backstory in the recent 4th wall event. While it started out as a means of survival, and one he hoped to one day parlay into a genuine return to life, he developed a genuine rapport with some of the other members of the crew. This, coupled with the fact that some of the Authority ships were genuinely troubling, made it easier for him to justify his role in the raids, whether it be attempting to talk other crews into giving up their stores with a minimum of violence, or engaging in said violence when that failed.

The "rescue" of the Barge's passengers shook him badly, both because it was a deviation from the normal way of doing things, and because they weren't Authority. He didn't become any more comfortable with the situation as time went on, and went from sympathetic and attempting to keep the peace and ensure some measure of fair play between the crews, to wanting to protect some of the Bargizens from retaliation, to willing to pass information to them in order to allow them to avoid or neutralize some of the Narrenschiff's heavy hitters so they could protect their people and stand a better chance of making an escape. He didn't join the fight on the Barge's side, but he restricted himself to protecting his own crew's food stores from potential sabotage.

Given both his unhappiness with the abduction and the fact that the Cap'n seemed, to him, to have jumped to "old thief convinced he's found the last big score" - something that never ends well - he had been intending to tender his resignation after the battle resolved. But, having been pulled back from death-by-godling and offered employment, he's hoping he's found something better to do with his afterlife.

Sample Network Entry: Here and here.

Sample RP: Here

Special Notes: As mentioned above, I played Remy during the recent 4th wall event, and he's coming in with that history intact. Since he was dead at the end of the battle and wasn't revived before Tendi brought his body to the Barge, I'd like to say he vanished when the ships separated, even though I'm lobbing this app in prior to the cut-off for characters to remain on the Barge continuously. This is mostly because I hadn't decided for certain if I'd be apping him right away when the event ended, and I don't want to stick her player with a retcon if it's at all avoidable.