APPLICATION

[partcompany]

[OOC]

Your Name: Vector
Contact: vectorspace @ plurk / vector.conduct@gmail.com
Are you at least 16 years of age or older?: Yes
Current Characters(s): N/A

[IC]

Is this a re-app?: No.
Character Name: Rhys
Journal: partcompany
Canon: Tales from the Borderlands
Canon Point: Post-game
Species: Human! (With cyborg parts.)
Age: ~28

History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Borderlands#Plot Gives the general overview of the game, of which Rhys is one of two protagonists. However, since Tales from the Borderlands is a choice-based game—the decisions the player makes affect the course of the story, though not the ultimate ending—I'll summarize some of the major decisions Rhys has made in my version.

One of the first major decisions comes when Rhys and his best friend, Vaughn, are separated from Fiona and Sasha, the Pandoran con artists they have recently made a temporary alliance with. Their caravan was severely damaged during a dramatic escape, and Fiona and Sasha plan to stop to repair it. Rhys has to make the decision to meet up with them, or forge ahead to their common goal without them. He chooses to meet their new "friends" and all go together.

The next big decision comes at that goal—an abandoned Atlas base. They are ambushed there, with Vaughn and Sasha are held at gunpoint while Rhys and FIona are forced to work the systems to retrieve what they came for—a "Gortys core." None of them have any idea what that is, except that it will somehow get them to the treasures of an alien Vault. However, Rhys accidentally trips the base's security systems, making their situation even worse as drones and turrets turn their guns on all of them. Fiona brandishes a grenade to hold the Gortys core hostage, asking Rhys to trust her; meanwhile, the AI version of Rhys' deceased role model, Handsome Jack, who is currently living in his head and only visible to him, asks Rhys to give him deeper control of his cybernetic systems so he can hack the turrets. Rhys's choice is to trust Jack. Trusting Jack unleashes chaos as the drones turn away from Rhys; they attack somewhat indiscriminately, as Jack doesn't try particularly hard to avoid Rhys's friends. They do, however, all manage to escape safely with the Gortys core.

Rhys confronts Jack about his actions on top of the caravan as they make their way to the next destination. Jack brushes off the danger to Rhys's friends, but promises it won't happen again. He also compliments Rhys, asks Rhys what he wants, offers to help him get it, and ultimately asks Rhys to agree they'll be working together. Rhys tentatively agrees.

Giving Jack that much leeway (and that much control of Rhys's subsystems) has consequences later. When Rhys knocks himself out in a fall while working towards the second Gortys piece, Jack takes over his body entirely, swaggering back to Rhys's friends, goading one of their newer allies towards murder, and slapping Sasha's ass.

Throughout all this, Jack has urged Rhys to keep his existence a secret from his friends and allies. However, Rhys chooses to tell Vaughn early on, and later on is forced to choose whether to tell Sasha and Fiona when he pulls information seemingly out of nowhere about the final Gortys piece being in Jack's office. He chooses to tell them. On the plus side, this explains to Sasha what happened; on the downside, they feel betrayed by the fact that he kept Jack a secret for that long—especially since, to Pandorans, Jack is a psychotic villain who wanted to raze their planet to the ground.

The climactic moment comes when Rhys and Jack are alone in Jack's office, and Jack makes Rhys an offer. Take over as CEO of Hyperion, and with Jack with him, they can run the company and be the strongest force in the universe, together. Rhys rejects Jack's proposition, telling Jack that he's a psychopath and everyone in Hyperion is an asshole. Jack does not take this well, and he controls Rhys's arm to upload himself into the space station's systems. He restrains Rhys and explains his plan to kill him, put a robot skeleton in his body, and wear him as a flesh suit as he reclaims his position on top. Rhys has to flee as Jack mobilizes the whole station to try to kill him.

(Incidentally, the flesh suit plan is also what Jack offers if Rhys agrees, apparently in full confidence Rhys will be getting everything he ever wanted by "becoming" his hero.)

Personality:
All Rhys has ever wanted was to run a company. He started a club when he was young just for the chance to print business cards. That's why he was working for the "best" company in the galaxy—Hyperion—and that's why he wanted to be just like Handsome Jack, the man who moved from low-level programmer to CEO in a fell swoop of crazed intuition, absurd self-confidence, and more than a little outright murder.

Rhys isn't particularly fond of killing people, himself—when prompted by his friends, he will agree they aren't murderers. His ruthless ambition is more focused around sketchy mining deals and ambivalence towards taking advantage of people. Still, Hyperion is a company where venting your rivals out of airlocks, while ballsy, is not entirely frowned upon, and Rhys seems to avoid it more out of practicality than morality—he's better at talking big and and gaining people's trust than he is at violence. He felt that he was making progress at that when the boss he sucked up to for ages was finally about to give him a big promotion. When it turned out Rhys's boss was in fact a floating corpse in space, replaced by his rival, who 'promoted' Rhys to janitor, Rhys had lost, in a sense, his entire life's work. That's part of the reason why he was willing to risk his life on a gamble to get it back.

The other reason is that Rhys did not really have a real idea of the danger involved. Rhys is often overconfident, and having lived his whole life in corporate bureaucracy, cutthroat as it may have been, he was wildly unprepared for the bloody, gun-slinging, monster-infested, hostile landscape of Pandora. Still, Rhys' best trait is his ability to be thrown in over his head and manage to figure it out it, if not necessarily elegantly. Rhys can actually keep his cool and be pretty competent, once he's over his initial fish-out-of-water reaction. And he certainly has no qualms killing people once his own life is in immediate danger.

Of course, there's no way Rhys could have predicted either the danger or the opportunities that having AI Jack in his head would offer. Rhys's relationship with Jack defines his personal journey over the course of the game. Handsome Jack was an idol to Rhys for many reasons—his charisma, his success, his skill, his confidence. Rhys had posters of Jack in his office, and instinctively mimicked the poster's pose in the hallways. It made him easy to manipulate—a version of Jack telling him that he could be like him if they worked together was a very seductive prospect. But having Jack casually take advantage of his trust and admiration soured Rhys on him even before he revealed his psychotic plan. Once Jack tried to kill him and Hyperion's space station crashed, Rhys swore he wouldn't be like Jack—a psychopath who died, alone, with no friends.

It's clearly still a sensitive subject for Rhys, however; in other aspects, he is very much following in Handsome Jack's footsteps. Using a stock certificate he scavenges from Jack's destroyed office, Rhys takes over as the new CEO of the defunct Atlas corporation, one of Hyperion's rivals that Jack had bought out. Rhys, with the help of his friends, even manages to open a Vault, which was the main thing that brought Jack into power. How exactly he'll manage to move forward without becoming like Jack is something he still has to figure out.

The major trait that sets Rhys apart from Jack, and one of his most redeeming features, is his trust in and loyalty to his friends. Vaughn comments more than once that Rhys being willing to stick with him is rare in Hyperion, and Rhys not only trusts and defends Vaughn, his long-time best friend, but Fiona and Sasha as well, con artists he just met. Some amount of this is calculated—his ambitions are things he can't accomplish alone. He genuinely likes and trusts Fiona and Sasha, though; he is overcome when they refer to him as a friend, and deeply hurt when he believes they've abandoned him. His sincerity helps to form rapports with people, as long as they're not complete assholes.

As far as his more superficial personality traits go, Rhys is a nerd trying to look cool. He cares deeply about looking suave and professional, and coming off as confident and on top of things. He is not excellent at this—his fashion sense is mocked repeatedly and he usually stumbles and stutters when he's trying to be smooth—but he accomplishes it to some extent. He's a good-looking guy who can get into parties, and who gets elected to give inspirational speeches to robots. He has a wry sense of humor that comes out in even the worst situations. He is, generally, well-liked, if not necessarily respected and admired in the way he'd hope for.

Powers & Abilities:
Rhys is a human middle manager with no remarkable physical or supernatural abilities—in fact he's skinny and weak as far as strength and endurance goes. His most obvious abilities come from his cybernetic enhancements—his ECHOeye can scan objects, remotely access systems, and project trajectories, and his hand has a holographic interface to a network. His arm is also, of course, made of metal, and substantially better at things like lifting and punching than his flesh arm. He is also skilled with tech in general—he's a pretty good hacker, and his eye and arm as of the end of canon are prototypes he put together himself.

Sample:
Test drive 1
Test drive 2

Prose sample:
"Ohhh god. Ooookay. Okay. You can do it, Rhys." Rhys has developed an unfortunate habit of talking to himself over the past few weeks. Of course, there's no one to hear him other than mushrooms and the weird spore-things that hover out in the forest, so there's no one to judge him. And the silence gets overwhelming sometimes, makes him start hearing phantom laughter or see flashes of blue at the edges of his eyes. His one eye.

He's hoping his new ECHOeye will help with that. "People... people stick new eyes in their head all the time. I mean, not themselves, usually they have a technician to help them with it, but really, how much difference does that make? My hands are sterile. That's the important part." He turns the new implant around in his hands.

He'd managed a new arm for himself pretty quickly, once he made it to the dome. The blueprints in the QuickChange gave him a head start on putting one together, and he's got enough basic mechanical engineering to make something that moves like an arm, at least. He'll have to improve on it later, make something sleeker, maybe shinier, but having more than one hand was priority one.

Priority two was the ECHOeye, and that was harder. Hyperion's model was proprietary, and he didn't have access to their databases anymore. He basically had to figure it out from first principles and whatever relevant prototypes he could find in the Atlas systems. It's not technically his area, but there's nothing like empty sockets in your temple and where your iris should be to give you some motivation to sharpen your skills. He's proud of what he came up with. Now he just has to install it.

"Yes. Okay. Now or never." Rhys stares at the equipment. "Or, I mean, now or later. You've got all the time in the world, technically. If you want to sit here with one eye like—like some crazy old guy living alone on a mountain, you can! But, come on! You... may be a little crazy, and living alone on a mountain, at this particular moment," he winces, "but you're young, clever, good looking. You can stick this in your head, no problem."

He takes a deep breath. "Right. Just... gonna... put it in." He does the port first, sliding it into his temple agonizingly slowly until the edge sits flush with his skin and he knows the connection is in position. That's the easy part. He needs a mirror for the second part, using tweezers to wire the actual eye implant up. He swallows back bile and tries to keep his hands steady. He thinks he gets everything connected right.

"Alright! Moment of truth," he mutters, and fits the golden iris into the socket of his eye. It lights up faintly in the mirror, and then vision hits his optic nerve. It's disorienting and makes him even more queasy, but Rhys whoops.

"Yeahhhhh, I am a genius! Atlas tech is going right back to the top, baby!"