application for box

[aidenstop]

Player Information
Player name: Trace
Contact: just shout out your window and i'll float in like mary poppins
Are you over 18: maybe
Characters in The Box Already: shepard, clementine, sally

Character Information
Character Name: Jodie Holmes
Canon: Beyond: Two Souls
Canon Point: Black Sun chapter, when she's unconscious from the neuro-acid
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: Alive
History: summarized here!

A note!
Due to the malleability of both Jodie and Aiden, not to mention the storyline as a whole, made up a timeline of exactly which choices were made when, located here. It probably won't make a ton of sense to the canonblind, but. Still.

Personality:

Jodie Holmes is a girl on the run. She always has been, though what she's running from has changed vastly over the years, from the quite literal ethereal monsters in her basement to the CIA itself. Why? It all comes down to this: Jodie was born with a gift. Or a curse - it really depends on the day. You can't see it, but she's connected to what can only be called ~an entity~. Tethered would be a better word. There's no escape. Trust me, she's tried. This entity is Aiden, and he's been with her since the day she was born, though neither Jodie nor science can figure out why.

Jodie is not a hero. Not by a long shot. When she sees a problem and she's the only one who can fix it, she'll step up without much hesitation, but it's more that it's her responsibility than something she likes doing. She prefers keeping her head down, slipping under the radar, not doing anything particularly special because being extraordinary and gifted is what gets the CIA drafting you and lying to you and chasing you down and ugh. (That's an interesting thing - most characters you see in the CIA in other canons, whether they wanted to be there or not, begin to fall into a CIA mindset. Jodie never does. She's always there to do what they force her to do because they forced her to join up.) Honestly, she'd rather just live a quiet life, a happy normal life, than go out and save lives. But since the day she was born, that option's been taken off the table whether she liked it or not.

She was born in a government lab and raised by a couple living on the adjacent military base - a foster home, not an adoption. Her foster mother came to love her like a daughter, but the father never quite warmed up to her, acting cold and even going so far as to call her a demon. Needless to say, she's had low self-worth from the get-go. The only one she could always count on was Aiden, who would shadow-puppet stories on the ceiling to distract her while her foster parents argued just on the other side of her bedroom floor. See, Jodie's always had this weird love-hate with Aiden, because he gets her in so much trouble but he's also the one who protects her, who comforts her. He's always there, and sometimes she thinks she wants to get rid of him and sometimes she even tries to go through with it, but given the option, she wouldn't be able to go through with it. A couple of times in canon, when dealing with various man-made holes into the Beyond, she thinks she loses Aiden and it scares the shit out of her.

Honestly, she depends on Aiden a lot more than she'd like to admit. Enough that she'd be sort of crippled without him. On any given mission, she uses Aiden to distract her enemies so they turn their backs, uses him to scout around corners and warn her for danger, uses him to take out security cameras and choke out people who threaten her - okay, no, most of the time that's actually Aiden's snap decision, but still. They're two parts of a team, but just like Aiden can't be without Jodie, she also can't do much without him.

Despite everything that happened to her throughout the fifteen years you see her in-game, Jodie is still ridiculously trusting. Relatively, anyway - that has faded a lot over the years, but she's still more trusting than the average CIA agent. Repeatedly through the years, people have asked her about her 'gift' and she's come out and told them. Reluctantly, but they didn't have to push too hard at all. At the party when she was about thirteen, that bit her in the ass hardcore, when she trusted this smug accent asshole with her secret and let him talk her into a slow-dance and kiss her and then he stabs her in the back with it and the other kids all lock her in a closet and burn her with cigarettes and it's a mess. Despite that, though, she still tells Stan and the other homeless folks (even showing them what she can do) and then the Navajo family who takes her in when she's hitchhiking through the desert. What I will say is this: She does get a little more careful who she tells and how, clearly putting a little more thought into judgment of character first, but still. Also, despite his being an utter asshole to her when he recruited her and all through training, she came around re: Ryan and ended up interested in him. This probably helped a whole bunch in blinding her to the fact that one of her most crucial missions (to kill a 'powerful warlord' in a third-world country) is a whole big lie. She finds out after the fact that she just assassinated their peace-bringing new president, not a warlord, and it utterly blindsides her. It hadn't occurred to her for a second that they were using her, even though she's smart enough to know how many people want to use her. That was a case of once-burned twice-shy - she actually literally jumped out of the moving helicopter to escape the CIA when she found out, and she never really trusted them again, though she eventually forgave Ryan when he proved himself later on. And, y'know, when she was pretty sure they were both dying anyway so why stay mad?

Jodie is definitely vengeful. If you maliciously hurt her or someone she cares about, she has no mercy. I feel like this may have in part come from Aiden - when you're that connected to someone, you kind of rub off on each other - but it's still a very valid point. This is shown early on at the party, where the kids treated her like shit and locked her in a closet. Aiden let her out, and she had two options: Leave, just get out and away, or seek revenge. She glares at the closed door to the party room, and in a low voice she says, "Get them, Aiden." Aaaand he proceeds to throw tables at teenagers, put knives through shoulders, and generally set the house on fire. Valuable Ally Award goes to Aiden, I've gotta say. Later on, after the CIA fucks her over and tries to hunt her down, she no longer has any mercy. Men get hurt and die in that chase, especially near the end, when she's cornered and has Aiden outside raising hell. Trucks explode, gas stations explode, helicopters go down, people get possessed into shooting their buddies and themselves, it's a bloodbath. And when it's over, she marches out, grabs the ring-leader by the jacket, and says, "Tell them to leave me the fuck alone. Because next time, I'll kill everyone." Jodie isn't a killer by nature, but once you've both burned her like the CIA did and then tried to hunt her down like an animal, she starts to make exceptions. Even Ryan, who (three whole years later, when they finally catch her again) tries to apologize and be friends again, she says that for the sake of the mission, she'll try to keep Aiden from killing him... but no promises. This is the man she once thought she loved, before he betrayed her. Point is: You don't want to screw her over.

Despite all of that, though, part of her is still your typical early-twenties woman, and a pretty sweet one at that. When the Navajo family take her in for a bit, she goes out on her first work day (doing chores on the farm) and crouches in front of their old mute grandma's wheelchair, introducing herself quietly and saying she's going to stay for a few days, "if that's okay with you". She goes on to compliment the woman's blanket, asking if she made it herself. Jodie didn't expect an answer, but she was going to try. It's only polite, y'know. Honestly, whenever she meets people who are genuinely good to her, she does everything she can to help them. Just with the homeless folks alone, she helps Stan get food and then saves him from a beat-down and then channels his dead wife for him, she gets rid of Jimmy's withdrawls, she helps reassure Tuesday that her baby is okay and then subsequently delivers that baby... And then saves them all from a burning building, with Aiden's help of course. They took her in, welcomed her into their family, so she was warm and open with them. That's an interesting thing about her. Many people with ~abilities~ who end up hunted for those abilities hate people - the general 'everyone'. Jodie compartmentalizes her anger very very well. She knows who she hates and who hasn't done anything wrong. One person's wrongs don't make her angry at the next person. Each person gets a whole new chance, whether they deserve it or not.

Jodie loves talking to others, hearing their stories. She grew up on the base, so despite Nathan and Cole (her therapist and helper) doing everything they could to funnel "normal girl" stuff into her room, she couldn't really leave the base aside from very special occasions. Especially after what happened at the party with those kids (which totally wasn't her fault but whatever!!). So Jodie was a lot more sheltered than she would've liked to be. She honestly didn't mind the lab part - it was home, and Nathan and Cole quickly became her dad and uncle figures, and the entire time she was there they never once made her feel anything less than spectacular for what she and Aiden could do. But because of this sheltered life, it's only since the CIA drafted her that she really saw anything of the outside world. That means that basically any story is interesting to her, even if it's just like "my buddies got drunk and we drove through the McDonalds drive-through backwards" or some shit. She also has a super hard time letting things go when weird shit's afoot, as shown by how hard she pushes Paul and Jay and co. when they try to keep her in the dark about the entities that attack their farm at night. She's kind of hypocritical that way, because while she tends to be decently open about Aiden, she asked them pressing questions long before she was ready to share anything.

Let's be real here, Jodie's also pretty used to not having friends. Besides Aiden, and he can't talk back to her - not out loud, anyway. So she likes to connect to people but she's also totally fine doing her own thing. She's never really alone-alone, after all. Because of this, though, she's been shown to talk to herself all throughout the game. A huge example is the scene where she's inviting Ryan for dinner - she lays on the bed with a 'RELAX, JODIE' speech, and when she chooses her clothes, she fakes her end of a conversation wearing each outfit just to try it on. I noticed that she doesn't talk to herself so much when she and Aiden are getting along (in that scene, he's fighting her every step of the way, so she's temporarily disowning him), so that's quite possibly also a thing.

A thing to note about Jodie: The only time she's not chill is when she's angry. She's not someone who gets super excited about stuff, not outwardly, even if she's thrilled on the inside. When she was younger, when she got her first kiss, the only display of how fucking ecstatic she was was a quiet smile of wonder. She's just really laid-back in general, like the 'oh, yeah, nbd' sort of gal. Her sense of humor is dry, a little sarcastic - half the time, you don't realize she's joking until afterward. On one mission, Ryan tells her to "just act natural. If anyone talks to you, just smile." She dryly says, "Do you want me to act natural, or do you want me to smile?" He says he didn't know she had a sense of humor. She says, "Only when I'm scared to death." That is a pretty good indication of her personality in general, I feel like. Even when she's nervous, though, it's a slow kind of nervous. She doesn't really get jittery-scared. She's pretty good at keeping it under control.

All in all, despite being chill and trying to keep her head down in general, Jodie can definitely be an opinionated woman who speaks her mind. She is not afraid to say FUCK YOU if she's not happy with someone - she's not even afraid to deliver death threats, no matter who the recipient. She doesn't want to be hunted because she doesn't want to deal with any more trouble than she already has. She isn't afraid of being hunted. There's a key difference. In any given scenario, she is 200% certain that she and Aiden will come out on top. There just may be a shit-ton of collateral damage in the process. The only thing she's truly afraid of is losing Aiden. In the possible endings in which she loses him (which are after her canonpoint but a good indication), she's more depressed and alone than she's ever been in her life, despite having a peaceful ~perfect~ life in a lake house in the beautiful wilderness. Without him, she's just... nothing, she feels like.

MEANWHILE, since he is his own entity despite being connected to her, I'm gonna ramble a bit about Aiden here too.

From the very start, he's a sort of mystery. You aren't sure why he's there, what his end-goal is, what exactly he wants from Jodie. As the game goes on, it becomes clear - it's seriously just Jodie he wants. Not romantically, but he feels like she belongs to him either way.

There are two sides to Aiden that we see throughout the game, though they blur a bit as Jodie gets older and starts to share Aiden's opinions. There's the soft side of Aiden that clearly loves Jodie to death, then the angry side of him that fucks shit up and doesn't give a damn.

Firstly, it's important to note that despite the way Jodie uses him for so many things, the vast majority of the time, Aiden takes it like an eager puppy. Like OH, I CAN HELP YOU?? SWEET LEMME GO DO THAT. He is all about helping Jodie out, no matter what she needs. Throughout her childhood, he's shown to be very sweet to her most of the time, between the comforting shadow-puppets on the ceiling, the way he sneaks her a cookie behind her foster mom's back, and the way that sad-Jodie sometimes replies to comforting stuff Aiden must have 'said' to her. When she's younger, she comforts him right back. "Don't be afraid, Aiden," she says. "We're gonna have a good night's sleep, and nothing is gonna happen." Much like with the strength of their abilities, it seems like part of Aiden himself seemed to grow and mature as she aged. He used to be as young and confused as she was, but in a less physically tangible way. Now that they're older, he still has her back, but he doesn't get all mushy on her like when they were younger. Now, it comes more in the form of sticking with her and helping her out of shit and destroying her enemies. Which brings me to my next point.

Aiden is a force to be reckoned with. From the very start, he's only halfway been under Jodie's control. In a simple experiment when they were about eight, when asked to move small items, he threw the items everywhere, flipped the table, broke the windows, and made good progress in choking the poor volunteer. She survived, but many of his later victims did not. I mentioned what he did to the kids at the party, up in the section about Jodie's vengeance. That's basically his element. Even without Jodie's permission, he fucks people up on her behalf - he tried to choke her dickhole foster dad on his way out, the day her foster parents abandoned her with Nathan. He almost succeeded, despite Jodie telling him not to.

Now that they're older, they seem to be on more of a level playing field, but when Jodie was younger, part of her was scared of him. She told Nathan, "I don't tell Aiden what to do. No one does. He's like a lion in a cage." And as happy as he is doing whatever Jodie wants most of the time, when shit doesn't go the way he wants, he throws epic fits. Take the time she invited Ryan for dinner. I mentioned earlier that she temporarily disowned him, but there's a perfectly good reason. He flung shit all over to make a mess for her, broke her computer so she wouldn't see Ryan's invite, stacked the chairs all up on the table, and all kinds of other pain-in-the-ass stuff that got her yelling at him for like five minutes straight. A few minutes later, when she takes a shower, she gets out and "you don't need him, you have me" is written in the fog on the mirror. Aiden gets super butthurt whenever she's seriously interested in someone, especially someone who treated her less than perfectly in the past. Later he gets over himself and calls Ryan (and Cole) to Jodie's aid, but that's something like three years later, maybe four.

Aside from his fits of butthurt and possessiveness, Aiden rarely does shit independent of Jodie. Like I said, he helps her get her shit done. The exception comes when she's in some kind of trouble, at which point he acts independently of her whether she likes it or not. Right after she meets Stan and the other bums, she tries to jump to her death off an overpass (it's an all-time low for her, what can I say), and he catches her and puts her back upright. She doesn't get to kill herself, that's one of his rules. Plus a couple of days earlier, she was passed out in the snow, and Aiden's jostling of trash cans and shopping carts was what got Stan to notice her and take her in to start with. Probably the most notable example, though, is right before her canonpoint when McGrath tries to inject her with a neurotoxin to put her into a permanent catatonia. Aiden himself is too weak to get her unstrapped and free, so he runs off while she's unconscious to go get Ryan and Cole himself. He can act on his own if she's in trouble - in fact, he'll do it without hesitating.

All in all, Aiden cares basically zilch for anyone but Jodie. He is possessive and protective and eager to please her, but he doesn't give two fucks about who dies in the process. His sense of morals is very very skewed, if he has one at all. It's only Jodie's morals that keep them on the right track, as a general rule.



Items on your character at canon point: Her clothes, her phone, her passport (under the name 'Elizabeth North'), and a totally legit check for $500,000.



Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:

JODIE HERSELF -
+ can 'hear'/communicate with aiden
+ military-trained in hand-to-hand, firearms, stealth, etc (anything the CIA would've taught)
+ in good physical condition
+ crafty as fuck, managed to evade the actual CIA for a while
- basically a normal human being

AIDEN -
+ TELEKINESIS - is able to move and/or throw objects, canon examples as large as flipping trucks
+ INTANGIBLE - able to move through walls/ceilings unseen
+ POSSESSION - can take over someone's body as long as no one touches said body (telltale sign - the person's eyes go white, and they go mute) - note that I'd only use this with prior planning
+ HEALING - has been shown to heal up to a deep side-wound, can also work on sharp physical discomfort (withdrawl symptoms etc)
+ M...EDIUM...SHIP? - idk what to call this, but if jodie touches an item, aiden can show her a flash of something to do with it (eg. who it belongs to or where it has been)
+ SAME BUT WITH BODIES - she can find a dead body and aiden can show her the ~5 seconds surrounding the person's death
+ SHIELDING - he can put up a shield in front of or around her that has been shown to deflect bullets and help her survive a fall from however the fuck high helecopters fly with just a little limp
+ COMBAT OTHER ENTITIES - this isn't probably a thing in an RP, but in canon, he fights off the evil entities (they look like black clouds with glowing jaws)after her that jodie has no way to fight off for herself


Jodie has been shown to be able to see through Aiden's eyes and even try to influence him, but at a cost. Even seeing through his eyes long enough to send him upstairs so she could write down some secret codes left her exhausted and bleeding from the nose. That's how it always works, the nose-bleeds, and her eyes go white too. In the Dinner scene, one of his butthurt actions is to try to lock her in her own bedroom, but she pulls a YOU WANNA PLAY? TWO CAN PLAY THIS ONE, MOTHERFUCKER and seems to take over Aiden long enough to let herself out. It seems to be incredibly hard on her to do so though - in the testing scene as a kid where Aiden's fucking shit up and choking the volunteer, she doesn't even put a dent in slowing him down and she still has a nosebleed hardcore. It's unknown whether Aiden can possess Jodie herself - it was never shown in canon. She'd be pissed if he did, though. Hardcore pissed.

Aiden's strength seems to wane with Jodie's. When she's unconscious it doesn't seem to count, but the neuro-acid weakens him just like it does her. However, that does allow him to wander far enough to get Ryan and Cole - if she were conscious, he couldn't stray more than maybe 30 feet because it physically hurts her if he does so (and he gets a sort of block, like a less painful version of hitting the Box wall), but when she's unconscious that barrier seems to be lifted.

Weaknesses... The above is definitely a weakness. Their physical inability to be more than 30 feet apart is one, too. Plus, malicious spirits tend to flock to her because of her connection with Aiden, so she's got a huge target painted on her back in that sense. In a situation like Box, it'd also be very possible to overdo her whole 'seeing through Aiden's eyes' thing and wear herself down hardcore. Also, it seems like Aiden occasionally has trouble with finesse telekinesis. Like, he could tip a truck but not undo a tight buckle.


Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample: A Dear Player entry, albeit from post-game instead of her exact canonpoint. She'd basically sound the same. cry, that was before I realized Aiden had an E in it

Prose Log Sample:

"This place isn't so bad, y'know," she says, sizing up the carefully-stacked tower of blocks with a half-tilted head and her palms rubbing together in her lap. It's a lie, this place is basically a shithole, but if she could talk Aiden into feeling a little better about it, that'd be a hell of a load off her shoulders.

In response, the curtains flutter aside to reveal the rain, which is currently pouring like a motherfucker.

C'mon, Aiden - it could be worse. "We could be out in it?" They've definitely been out in it before.

He grants her that, in the form of stealing her turn and carefully pushing a single block out from somewhere in the middle of the tower. It drops to the ground, and the tower doesn't waver. Aiden's a cheater that way.

There aren't any entities here, he points out. Nothing to try to grab her in the night. That is a very good point, she decides as she pulls a block out from slightly higher on the tower. It still doesn't waver. She's kind of a cheater that way, too. "Or if there is, it goes down with a few bullets." Not like entities, malicious clouds of black murk that'll tear you to pieces if you give them a chance. The kind of stuff Aiden's protected her from for years.

She won't need to shoot, though. He wants her to know that. Entities or human beings or whatever monsters they're ready to throw at her - she won't have to fight. She doesn't need people, or a gun. All she needs is him.

Jodie doesn't want to argue right now. Time to change the subject. "So are we playing, or...?" She glances up at him - she can't really see him, but she feels where he is - then pointedly back at the Jenga tower. All at once, the blocks scatter as if struck, clattering across the floor and nearby wall. Jodie lets out a slow exhale through her nose, laying back on the cold floor and closing her eyes. "I guess not." She picks her battles, with him. This isn't one of them. She wasn't really that into the game, anyway.