MY NAME IS OLIVER QUEEN || App for Fractured Reality

[wilsooon]

Player name: Jae
Journal: wilsooon
AIM/Plurk: plurk name is ninjae
Email: anjelsword at gmail dot com
Other characters: None.

Character name: Oliver Queen
Age: 27
Canon: Arrow / DC - permission given by Zoe and Sara to app
Canon point: Near the end of episode 13, after he discovers the Queen’s Gambit was sabotaged and his mother knew.

Totem: His father’s book. During standard Limbo, it contains a list of names of individuals Oliver has been targeting during his vigilante activities; during Fissures, it is blank.

Weapons: His bow, a full quiver, and two small wristlets armed with flechettes. Several of the arrows have explosives, listening devices, and light charges; the flechettes are drugged.

Abilities/powers: He speaks fluent Mandarin, Russian, and probably other East-Asian or East-European languages. He's a dead shot with low-tech projectile weapons and incredibly fast and skilled in combat (Eskrima and possibly Russian Sambo). He's done pretty much nothing in the last five years but fight, and has the speed, instincts, and skills to show for it.

Location: The former Queen Consolidated factory from the Glades, abandoned five years ago and in the process of being remodeled into a nightclub; the exterior is corrugated metal and rust, the premises surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Inside, it’s full of scaffolding and half-finished projects, leaving it suspended somewhere between high-class party destination and dilapidated manufacturing structure. The basement is closed off from the rest of the building, a hidden entrance allowing Oliver access; it's stocked with a poorly-networked set of cutting edge computers, his weights and obstacle course, and the machinery he uses to fashion his arrows.

Personality:

To say Oliver doesn’t have many illusions about himself would be an absolute lie. He looks in the mirror and sees pretty much nothing but illusions. The ones he presents to his friends and family, yes, but also the ones he creates for himself. The person he sees, at least immediately after being pulled off the island, is a stranger, neither the boy he remembers before Lian-Yu or the self he constructed to protect him mentally and physically on the island itself. When he gets to Starling City from the island he sees a person who is essentially worthless outside of the vendetta assigned by his father; he’s a tool that exists to serve a purpose. What he doesn’t factor in to this belief is the influence of those around him and the affect that their opinion of him has on his own mental state.

There’s a feral edge to almost everything he does. Unless he’s inhabiting the persona of Oliver Queen, unfettered playboy, he walks stiffly, watches his environment like an animal outside of its den, doesn’t quite seem to fit his clothes or his surroundings. When thrust into a social situation for which he doesn’t have previous context to draw from, his easy grin and irreverence evaporate into silence and a long stare, sometimes with an added dose of clear confusion if it’s not a situation in which he feels threatened.

It’s one of the most important aspects of his character that Ollie is not, at first, a vigilante or a hero, in his own mind or in his actions. He’s a killer, pure and simple. He has no aspirations to be anything more, and hasn’t even considered his own survival as a factor in his objectives. He’s been the recipient of nothing but violence during human contact for over five years; his framework for the analysis and acceptance of human kindness has been completely destroyed. Injuring and killing others seems to affect Oliver about as much as killing a chicken would affect a farmer. Sentimentality and remorse weren’t factored into the requirements for survival. He knows how to wound, physically and emotionally, how to create distance, how to lie without blinking, and how to hide insecurity until he’s not sure how to show it any more. And he’s incredibly, desperately lonely.

Casual physical intimacy is no longer an option. Even if he weren’t conditioned to react violently against the closeness of anyone he doesn’t know, there are only about four people, excluding the doctor, who know how badly he’s scarred. Between the clear damage his body has been through and the Russian mob tattoo on his chest, Oliver makes sure to keep himself entirely covered whenever he’s not alone. It’s a question of logistics, certainly – he doesn’t want people asking questions he can’t or won’t answer – but it’s also self-consciousness, a form of self-protection, because those questions would also force him to relive the torture that earned him many of the scars, and he does that enough on his own. He’s uncomfortable with what they are and what they mean to the people that see them. There are those like Digg who understand, but for the civilized world the scars are a mark of trauma, potential weakness, and personal suffering. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s pity case, and he is aware enough of how broken he is that he doesn’t want the reminder, even from people who care.

Ollie’s sanity – or at least his stability – is anchored by ritual. When he was on the island there was nothing to distract him, no external influences, no energy for existential questions. He had two priorities: survive, and return to Starling City to pursue the individuals listed in his father’s book. Now, back in the crowded pound and grind of the world he left behind, with his immediate needs cared for and responsibilities and relationships pulling him in a dozen directions, it would be extremely easy to fall apart; instead he seems to make simple tasks into ceremonies, pouring a disproportionate amount of focus into things like getting dressed, cleaning, eating, maintaining his weaponry, and crossing names out of his father’s book when their debts have been paid. He uses specific exchanges when addressing criminals, and seems to have a slang vocabulary that’s going on twenty years out of date – phraseology likely adopted from his father after the man’s death. Every little action to which he applies his focus is a touchstone, a reminder of where and when and who he is. He still loses track on occasion – as evidenced by the way he attacked his mother when she approached him one night as he slept. He spends long stretches without sleep, and when he does sleep is plagued by nightmares of his father’s death and what resulted.

He’s disturbingly malleable and incredibly naïve, still a rich brat under all of his trauma. Oliver says on several occasions that he can’t waste his time fighting petty criminals and bank robbers, that he has an objective and can’t be distracted from it. He doesn’t care about the small-scale victims of regular crimes. It takes Diggle force-feeding him low-class crime fighting for Ollie to realize that he can and should do more than play Robin Hood. He can be a hero, not just a weapon. He tries to pass on this lesson in his own inexperienced way to Helena Bertinelli when they cross paths, but it doesn’t stick – and while he’s in her orbit, he ends up in a series of conflicts that force him to kill, until he confronts her directly to save the man she’s been targeting all along. Adaptation was the key to him living this long. Acceptance of what he couldn’t change about his surroundings and what his surroundings would require him to do. He’s comfortable shifting gears depending on who he’s keeping company with, but there are a few lines that he won't cross no matter the circumstances. Killing innocents or those who haven't been given a chance to atone for their crimes is one of those lines.

He has an incredibly vicious streak when it comes to protecting the people he cares about. An inmate who assaults his ex nearly gets beaten to death when Ollie pulls the man off of her; the shooter who tags Diggle gets an arrow through the eye; Ollie breaks the neck of a man indirectly responsible for his mother being injured, and only stops Helena Bertinelli (the actual shooter) with a minimum of violence because she found him out and he fell for her. The drug dealer responsible for developing Vertigo, which gets his sister arrested after she crashes her car while high, gets a massive injection of his own drug that leaves the man screaming for days.

Oliver's nanny tells him on his return from the island that he has a good heart – his heart is in the right place, certainly, but he has a long way to go before he’s firmly in the spectrum of “good”. He doesn’t want to be seen as a monster in the eyes of those he loves; it’s the primary tether that keeps him from killing without restraint, from taking the shortest possible route to an efficient reduction in crime. He’s incredibly hypocritical regarding his standards for what is justice and how much force is required in a given situation; it depends on his own feelings, and whether or not Digg is there to hold him back.

John Diggle is probably the single most positive influence in Oliver’s life. He’s the only one who didn’t demand anything of Oliver immediately, who told him it was all right to take his time dealing with what he’d been through, and who didn’t tell him that he needed to open up or stop lying. It’s not surprising that Oliver talked to Diggle first about some of what happened to him and what he planned to do, taking the man on as a partner in vigilante crime. It’s Diggle who’s kept Oliver on the straight and narrow, who demanded a drop in the casualty count, and who’s shown Oliver the value of helping people beyond the scope of his mission. He’s the one who influenced the shift in the media’s response to Ollie’s actions, because once he started going after dangerous criminals of all shades, that’s when he started being called a hero – and it’s when that recognition came that Oliver really started to feel like what he did mattered, That is when he started to like being the good guy, not just a boogeyman. Doing good and being called a hero for it is probably the first form of positive reinforcement he’s gotten, between his spoiled upbringing, paparazzi attention, and his various Ivy-league drop outs and the petty crimes of his teen and young adult years. Failure was met either with a surge of attention or, later, violence – which gives him a powerful subconscious incentive to keep being the good guy. It feels nice to be counted on, and that responsibility has gradually made him more responsible in other areas of his life as well, as he’s learned to balance the vigilante and his home life.

All that said, if you’ve earned his loyalty and affection, Oliver is an extremely gentle individual, handling his relationships almost gingerly. It leads to a lot of social awkwardness and verbal missteps. He doesn’t always know when it’s inappropriate to joke, occasionally makes observations he should really keep to himself, and has trouble reading people when they aren’t being aggressive. He was a clown before the island and his humor stuck around, even if it didn’t stay entirely intact and has turned slightly morbid at times. He takes jokes well and doesn’t hold petty grudges, brushing off eighty percent of the rude or cruel things people say when heated as exactly what they are: attempts to wound spoken in the moment. He has (when he exercises it) a great capacity for mercy and forgiveness, in part because he sees himself as someone irredeemable, without any place to judge others. It’s only when you go after a loved one or turn down the opportunity to atone for past actions that clemency gets taken off the table. And once it gets taken away, it isn’t offered again.

History:

His history until five and a half years ago was simple enough. He was born to Robert and Moira Queen, the former of whom was the CEO of Queen Consolidated, a multi-billion dollar international company seeming to specialize in technology and medicine. When he was ten, his sister Thea was born. There's every indication that he was a doting brother, letting her tag along with him and his friends whenever legality would allow and making sure she stayed out of trouble as best as an irresponsible teenager and then twenty-something could. He was spoiled, incredibly so, going to private and prep schools with his best friend Tommy Merlyn before heading to the Ivy Leagues and dropping out of four different ones in succession. A consummate philanderer, he had several girls on the side while dating Dinah Laurel Lance, whom he admired for her idealism and dogged pursuit of justice for Starling City’s poor.

At age twenty-two, he invited Laurel’s sister to come with him and his father on a pleasure cruise aboard the Queen's Gambit - which unbeknownst to those aboard was rigged to sink. During a storm in the North China Sea, the ship went to pieces, drowning the majority of the crew, Sarah Lance, and leaving Oliver adrift with his father and one other man in a life boat. As their supplies dwindled, Robert Queen decided it would be an awesome idea to kill the other survivor and himself in the thin hope that Oliver would make land before dying from dehydration or exposure. Before shooting himself in the head right in front of his twenty-two year old son, he admonished Oliver to "right his wrongs", saying that he'd failed Starling City and wished he had more time to correct things himself.

He then killed himself. Oliver didn't dump the body, instead floating with his father's corpse until the life raft was carried to the shores of the island of Lian Yu. He spent the first day or so eating the rest of the survival supplies and drinking the rest of the water on the raft, before the animals worrying at his father's body forced him to realize he needed to bury it. He did so, first searching his father's pockets and finding the book containing a list of names that would later direct Oliver's vendetta on behalf of his father. At this point he discovered he wasn't alone on the island, and was incapacitated and dragged to a cave by a man wearing a green hood.

This is where canon gets a little ambiguous, since the interim five years between his being shipwrecked and brought back to Starling City is getting told through flashbacks as the show progresses. The implied facts are these: He did not spend the entirety of that time on the island; the man in the green hood who saved his life also taught him archery; there is a possibility he worked as a mercenary, and a definite likelihood that he’s the one who took Deathstroke’s eye, as Slade had both when they first met and his mask is seen in the first episode, hung like a totem with an arrow through the eye sockets. Definitive facts, either mentioned offhand or shown in flashbacks, are these: Some time during the five years, he found a message his father left him somewhere outside of the island; he became a captain in the Russian Bratva after saving the life of Anatoli Knyazev, also known as the KGBeast in main DC continuity; Slade Wilson was his first martial arts teacher and also his torturer, though the latter is unconfirmed.

Canon-confirmed facts pick up again in 2012, when Oliver gets himself rescued by a fishing boat passing close to Lian Yu. It’s clear that he’s been alone and living wild for some time. After his rescue, he lives on his family's estate with his sister, mother, their staff, and his body guard and friend John Diggle. Malcolm Merlyn - unbeknownst to any of the above but Oliver's mother - is part of a cabal aimed at reshaping Starling City and its surrounding region through criminal enterprise and blackmail. Ollie's mother is also part of this conspiracy, though her participation is increasingly unwilling and hinges around Malcolm Merlyn's kidnapping of her husband, Oliver's stepfather, Walter Steele.

Starling City is a warren of petty and major criminal conspiracies. The cops are perpetually overwhelmed and understaffed, most prosecutors won't try the criminal bigwigs, and there are probably a handful of judges who aren't as corrupt as the people who walk in and out of their courtrooms every day. The villains Oliver faces on a regular basis have not to date exhibited any superhuman abilities: he's taken down a family of bank robbers who shot and nearly killed a cop, helped put a man nicknamed "the Count" behind bars for selling a drug called Vertigo and experimenting on the homeless to perfect its high, stopped a former fireman who was killing his squad-mates, and has blackmailed, robbed, and strong-armed a growing list of rich dirtbags into turning themselves in or repaying money and goods stolen from the people of Starling City. He's a one man wrecking crew and it's starting to show in the numbers - violent crime has decreased and some wealthy criminals have started turning themselves in when the vigilante's shadow falls across them.

While characters who share the names of DC heroes have appeared - Dinah Laurel Lance, Oliver's former girlfriend and a Starling City attorney being one of them - there has been no indication as yet that they are or will become part of this universe's stable of heroes. Others of significance include Laurel's father, a cop who despises Oliver and pursues the vigilante with fanatic dedication; Oliver's friend McKenna Hall, who works Vice; and Oliver's sister Thea Dearden Queen, nicknamed Speedy, over whom he is extremely protective. His circle of true friends is small, and none of them but John Diggle, his bodyguard, know the truth about how he spends his nights.

Oliver works on a regular basis with Felicity Smoak, a techie whom he’s all but told about his second identity. She’s the one who comes to him with a copy of his father’s book, found by Walter Steele just before his disappearance. She tells him it belongs to his mother. It’s a revelation Oliver doesn’t want to face, goes out of his way to avoid, so John Diggle pursues the lead without Oliver’s knowledge or consent and manages to bug Moira during a meeting with an anonymous male (Malcolm Merlyn). He discovers that Moira is not only involved in something that she only refers to as ‘the Undertaking’, but that the Queen’s Gambit was rigged to sink and that Moira has known for an undetermined amount of time.

Oliver heard the recording himself. He’s still in denial.


3rd person sample:

The sound of water in rhythm gives him nightmares. It’s why he hasn’t gone to Starling City’s beachfront after his first weeks home, since the picnic his family thought would do him good that ended with an assault on his mother when she startled him out of sleep that night.

It no different here.

In the dark in his room he can hear the waves. Eyes open or closed, he can see the shores of Limbo, the crumbling world like a vision of what Starling City could become. It’s too easy to imagine his father on the beach with a gun in his hand and disappointment on his face. Like a reaper returning for his last victim.

Oliver rolls over to face the wall, the bed as foreign as his own the first night back. He’s tempted to take the blankets to the floor, but the risk of being caught like that is ground in. He digs his nails into the wall instead, something concrete. Something real. The phantom ocean fades into silence, though he can’t help replaying the collapse of a building into the sand over and over like a visual mantra.

It isn’t real. The wall, the bed, the building, the city, going on and spreading out ad infinitum none of it is real.

He can feel plaster under his nails.

He applies pressure until it digs into skin. Survive. Get home. Familiar, simple goals to start.

Survive.


1st person sample:

[He looks frosty. Flushed, damp, with snow in his hair and on his shoulders.] We’re in Freaktown. Limbo. Dreamland, or something, right? So can anyone tell me why the snow is cold and wet. It seems like -

[He flounders in aggravation and finishes lamely:] Cheating. There should be a plus side to this.

[Oliver remembers then to dust himself off, but the snow’s already melted into his clothes. He paws uselessly at his shoulders anyway.] I don’t remember snow being this annoying.

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Note: For the purposes of RP, I’m going to say that superhuman powers are not widespread but do have a presence in Oliver’s world, and that while the majority of the members of the Justice League may exist and be operating in their respective cities, none are at this point the world-saving heroes they may become.