Darja Popova (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mindread_it_all) wrote2013-09-08 08:14 pm
mindread_it_all) wrote2013-09-08 08:14 pm
App for Aegis
PLAYER INFO
Name: Kaja
Contact Information:kajarainbow, ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
kajarainbow, AIM: kajarainbow
Time Zone: Eastern Standard Time
Characters Played: None
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Darja Popova
Character Canon: Aegis original character
Canon Point: N/A (Age of sixteen)
Version: N/A
History:
Her first two years were relatively normal. She had pretty decent parents. And then the Awakening happened. Her sudden panicked reaction to all the thoughts coming from everywhere frightened her parents, who took her to a therapist. Since the Awakening was still a relatively new thing and her powers were entirely mental, it was taken as childish acting out. At this early age, she learned the harsh lesson that adults can't be counted on for everything and won't always understand.
She learned to just shut up about it. At first she was uncertain, but over time she figured out that what she was sensing was really what other people were thinking. And she ceased being surprised by nearly anything people did. She'd pretend to be surprised by things like surprise parties but refused to pretend to believe in Santa Claus and other such fanciful holiday figures the adults told lies about. Others just saw her as an abnormally perceptive but jaded child. "You just can't lie to Darja, she'll see right through it," they would say.
Still, even this pretense was taking a toll on her. She couldn't really stand crowds above a certain size, and she was growing more tired and tired of putting on the act. And then a visiting family friend, with some familiarity with the Awakened, took notice of her. She took Darja aside and had a very frank talk with her about her prospects. Darja found this astonishing--it wasn't the first time she'd seen someone who was completely honest in both their words and thoughts, but it was still unexpected. More unexpected was the picture being painted in this stranger's thoughts and words of a place where people like her could learn to tune their powers and control them, and overall belong better than they might in the outside world.
Thus, at the age of eight, Darja completely aced a test for mindreading. And Xavier himself came to take her to his Institute. But it wasn't quite the freedom she expected. After efforts to train her in being selective about her power proved futile, he instructed her not to let on she was reading others' minds. For the first couple or so years she obliged, but then got sick of the continued pretense and simply dropped it, telling people to their faces that she was reading their minds. This alienated some of the friends she had made and caused some turmoil, but finally, Darja settled into a somewhat more solitary existence, with fewer but more deeply trusted friends.
Still, she gained many benefits from her training at Xavier's institute. She learned to better filter and handle larger crowds, no longer feeling overwhelmed in them, and otherwise further developed her talents. She got teaching better tailored to challenge her, though it was tough at first not being able to rely on simply mindreading the teachers for answers to everything. With the increased challenge, she also got the chance to focus on the fields that interested her. The science classes being the primary ones. Wanting to understand why she and others had gotten those strange powers and also having a genuine curiosity about nature, she ended up taking more and more advanced classes, pushing onward until she was taking college level classes and even landing an internship in the Aegis Institute's labs at the early age of sixteen.
AU History: N/A
Personality:
Those that meet Darja quickly can see that she's pretty direct about voicing her thoughts, starting with her being quick to reveal she's reading their minds. She does it out of a kind of desire to be honest, and to even the playing field between her and others. In fact, her sense of fairness determines a lot of her worldview. And yet there're actually things she don't say. For one thing, she doesn't generally spill on others' secrets.
As a result of this, many think of her as having a rebellious streak, since she won't play along with what she doesn't agree with. She feels people should just accept each other for what they are, and so she doesn't really make an attempt to put on a polite face. She's decided she's fine with alienating most people, since those people wouldn't be the sort she'd want as her friends. She's actually pretty fussy about who she accepts as her friends since she judges them based on their thoughts versus their words. While her sense of principles can make her a pain to be around, she really does do her best to live up to them and to be a sincere and moral person.
Exposure to others' minds for pretty much her entire living memory has left her fairly jaded about others' thoughts. Weird thoughts, pervy thoughts, whatever. There isn't much that surprises or shocks her. And she's gotten pretty good at discerning the difference between actual intent and idle thought. She pretty much had to given how many people have idle thoughts about wanting to kill others and so on. Pretty much the only things that would disturb her would be particularly extreme thoughts, or actual intent upon violence. She's been pretty desensitized to vulgar language, and as such she uses it regularly enough.
She can be surprisingly mature about some things, in particular having more perspective on many things than most teenagers. This is all thanks to having direct exposure to many perspectives, as well as realizing she isn't alone in many experiences. Not to mention being aware of how she looks to others. And even if she's decided to not care on some levels about others' views of her (due in no small part to knowing no matter what she does there'll always be some who dislike her), it still has some influence upon her.
When she sets her mind to a purpose, she can be rather driven. She decided she wanted to understand the cause of her own and others' powers, and as such she singlemindedly pursued scientific excellence. Likewise her stubbornness about the whole honesty thing. It's also why she signed up to help out Aegis Project, even if just as an intern. While she hadn't been directly affected by the alien attacks, she'd had friends who had.
When she feels like a break from being around other people's minds, she tends to withdraw into her own room and read or browse the Internet. She treasures her own solitary time and tends to get very cross when it's interrupted, since it serves a major role in helping her be ready to handle people again. She's also fairly experienced with the Internet and the things on it.
Abilities:
Darja has always-on, involuntary mindreading with a range of about a room's width and the ability to reach further with concentration. She can also telepathically communicate, sending and receiving messages. She can essentially stun someone by giving them a strong mental jab, causing splitting headaches and dizziness. Finally, she can detect and block the use of telepathic or similar effects upon herself. It's possible, depending on mod approval, that as she continues training, she might be able to develop her telepathy further and control it better.
Belongings:
As someone born within the world of Aegis, she has assorted possessions in her room in Xavier's institute. Pretty much things you might expect a teenager to be able to own. There're also embarrassing childhood memorabilia at her parents' home.
Languages:
English, barely remembered bits of French and Spanish from required language classes. She tends to cheat anyways with her mindreading, even if it does take considerably more work to parse thoughts in languages she doesn't know.
Emergence Intro?:
As a native, she'll be introing straight away.
SAMPLES
First-Person:
Test run I did for Ruby City, using similar but not identical setting assumptions for her background--for one, no interdimensional transplants or Xavier.
Third-Person: (This will be my in-setting sample)
That Xavier guy was always on her. Trying to get her to be like him, all polite about the whole mindreading thing. Yeah, right. He's lucky he can turn it off. Hell, he has to turn it on. She'd whine about how he doesn't understand, but that's a really cliche teenager thing to do. She'd seen too much teenagers mentally whining about how their problems're ones no one'll ever understand and there's no one else with the same problems despite them being the same problems tons of other people have.
Anyways, she can tell even with his blocking her that he's really doing his best to be sympathetic to her. Whatever. It's not like she doesn't appreciate that. But he's not in her circumstances. And anyway, it's not really fair to read other people's minds and not tell them. It creates an information asymmetry and all. She doesn't want to lord her powers over others like that. Okay, sometimes they mistake her bluntness about her powers for just that, lording it over them, but it's not like they wouldn't get pissed off if they found out she was doing it all along.
Eh. She'll just drop in at the lab today. Thank goodness for her internship. She can work around people who don't really care too much and are more interested in thinking about some very interesting science. It's not like they don't have their own spare of office drama, but overall it's still one of her favorite places. She's learned a ton just from standing around them listening to them thinking about what they're working on.
Name: Kaja
Contact Information:
kajarainbow, Time Zone: Eastern Standard Time
Characters Played: None
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Darja Popova
Character Canon: Aegis original character
Canon Point: N/A (Age of sixteen)
Version: N/A
History:
Her first two years were relatively normal. She had pretty decent parents. And then the Awakening happened. Her sudden panicked reaction to all the thoughts coming from everywhere frightened her parents, who took her to a therapist. Since the Awakening was still a relatively new thing and her powers were entirely mental, it was taken as childish acting out. At this early age, she learned the harsh lesson that adults can't be counted on for everything and won't always understand.
She learned to just shut up about it. At first she was uncertain, but over time she figured out that what she was sensing was really what other people were thinking. And she ceased being surprised by nearly anything people did. She'd pretend to be surprised by things like surprise parties but refused to pretend to believe in Santa Claus and other such fanciful holiday figures the adults told lies about. Others just saw her as an abnormally perceptive but jaded child. "You just can't lie to Darja, she'll see right through it," they would say.
Still, even this pretense was taking a toll on her. She couldn't really stand crowds above a certain size, and she was growing more tired and tired of putting on the act. And then a visiting family friend, with some familiarity with the Awakened, took notice of her. She took Darja aside and had a very frank talk with her about her prospects. Darja found this astonishing--it wasn't the first time she'd seen someone who was completely honest in both their words and thoughts, but it was still unexpected. More unexpected was the picture being painted in this stranger's thoughts and words of a place where people like her could learn to tune their powers and control them, and overall belong better than they might in the outside world.
Thus, at the age of eight, Darja completely aced a test for mindreading. And Xavier himself came to take her to his Institute. But it wasn't quite the freedom she expected. After efforts to train her in being selective about her power proved futile, he instructed her not to let on she was reading others' minds. For the first couple or so years she obliged, but then got sick of the continued pretense and simply dropped it, telling people to their faces that she was reading their minds. This alienated some of the friends she had made and caused some turmoil, but finally, Darja settled into a somewhat more solitary existence, with fewer but more deeply trusted friends.
Still, she gained many benefits from her training at Xavier's institute. She learned to better filter and handle larger crowds, no longer feeling overwhelmed in them, and otherwise further developed her talents. She got teaching better tailored to challenge her, though it was tough at first not being able to rely on simply mindreading the teachers for answers to everything. With the increased challenge, she also got the chance to focus on the fields that interested her. The science classes being the primary ones. Wanting to understand why she and others had gotten those strange powers and also having a genuine curiosity about nature, she ended up taking more and more advanced classes, pushing onward until she was taking college level classes and even landing an internship in the Aegis Institute's labs at the early age of sixteen.
AU History: N/A
Personality:
Those that meet Darja quickly can see that she's pretty direct about voicing her thoughts, starting with her being quick to reveal she's reading their minds. She does it out of a kind of desire to be honest, and to even the playing field between her and others. In fact, her sense of fairness determines a lot of her worldview. And yet there're actually things she don't say. For one thing, she doesn't generally spill on others' secrets.
As a result of this, many think of her as having a rebellious streak, since she won't play along with what she doesn't agree with. She feels people should just accept each other for what they are, and so she doesn't really make an attempt to put on a polite face. She's decided she's fine with alienating most people, since those people wouldn't be the sort she'd want as her friends. She's actually pretty fussy about who she accepts as her friends since she judges them based on their thoughts versus their words. While her sense of principles can make her a pain to be around, she really does do her best to live up to them and to be a sincere and moral person.
Exposure to others' minds for pretty much her entire living memory has left her fairly jaded about others' thoughts. Weird thoughts, pervy thoughts, whatever. There isn't much that surprises or shocks her. And she's gotten pretty good at discerning the difference between actual intent and idle thought. She pretty much had to given how many people have idle thoughts about wanting to kill others and so on. Pretty much the only things that would disturb her would be particularly extreme thoughts, or actual intent upon violence. She's been pretty desensitized to vulgar language, and as such she uses it regularly enough.
She can be surprisingly mature about some things, in particular having more perspective on many things than most teenagers. This is all thanks to having direct exposure to many perspectives, as well as realizing she isn't alone in many experiences. Not to mention being aware of how she looks to others. And even if she's decided to not care on some levels about others' views of her (due in no small part to knowing no matter what she does there'll always be some who dislike her), it still has some influence upon her.
When she sets her mind to a purpose, she can be rather driven. She decided she wanted to understand the cause of her own and others' powers, and as such she singlemindedly pursued scientific excellence. Likewise her stubbornness about the whole honesty thing. It's also why she signed up to help out Aegis Project, even if just as an intern. While she hadn't been directly affected by the alien attacks, she'd had friends who had.
When she feels like a break from being around other people's minds, she tends to withdraw into her own room and read or browse the Internet. She treasures her own solitary time and tends to get very cross when it's interrupted, since it serves a major role in helping her be ready to handle people again. She's also fairly experienced with the Internet and the things on it.
Abilities:
Darja has always-on, involuntary mindreading with a range of about a room's width and the ability to reach further with concentration. She can also telepathically communicate, sending and receiving messages. She can essentially stun someone by giving them a strong mental jab, causing splitting headaches and dizziness. Finally, she can detect and block the use of telepathic or similar effects upon herself. It's possible, depending on mod approval, that as she continues training, she might be able to develop her telepathy further and control it better.
Belongings:
As someone born within the world of Aegis, she has assorted possessions in her room in Xavier's institute. Pretty much things you might expect a teenager to be able to own. There're also embarrassing childhood memorabilia at her parents' home.
Languages:
English, barely remembered bits of French and Spanish from required language classes. She tends to cheat anyways with her mindreading, even if it does take considerably more work to parse thoughts in languages she doesn't know.
Emergence Intro?:
As a native, she'll be introing straight away.
SAMPLES
First-Person:
Test run I did for Ruby City, using similar but not identical setting assumptions for her background--for one, no interdimensional transplants or Xavier.
Third-Person: (This will be my in-setting sample)
That Xavier guy was always on her. Trying to get her to be like him, all polite about the whole mindreading thing. Yeah, right. He's lucky he can turn it off. Hell, he has to turn it on. She'd whine about how he doesn't understand, but that's a really cliche teenager thing to do. She'd seen too much teenagers mentally whining about how their problems're ones no one'll ever understand and there's no one else with the same problems despite them being the same problems tons of other people have.
Anyways, she can tell even with his blocking her that he's really doing his best to be sympathetic to her. Whatever. It's not like she doesn't appreciate that. But he's not in her circumstances. And anyway, it's not really fair to read other people's minds and not tell them. It creates an information asymmetry and all. She doesn't want to lord her powers over others like that. Okay, sometimes they mistake her bluntness about her powers for just that, lording it over them, but it's not like they wouldn't get pissed off if they found out she was doing it all along.
Eh. She'll just drop in at the lab today. Thank goodness for her internship. She can work around people who don't really care too much and are more interested in thinking about some very interesting science. It's not like they don't have their own spare of office drama, but overall it's still one of her favorite places. She's learned a ton just from standing around them listening to them thinking about what they're working on.