App for Deerington

[righthemisphere]

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Raleigh Becket
Canon: Pacific Rim
Canon Point: End of first movie, between getting into his escape pod and surfacing.

In-Game Tattoo Placement: Right side of his lower back
Current Health/Status:
-Moderate burn injuries across his back and the right side of his body (see tattoo picture for scar map though it extends onto his front as well)
-Moderate to severe nerve damage.
-Insomnia.
Age: 27
Species: Human

Content Warnings:
Mentions of monsters/kaiju
Mentions of injury and death of family members
Mentions of depression and unhealthy coping mechanisms

History:
Film History | Character History

CRAU History and Impact: N/A

Personality:

Raleigh Becket is, at his core, a good person. A middle child with no particular skills by his own account, he spent his early life traveling the world with his family as his father’s job took them all over to work on specialized hydraulics projects. His mother Dominique was French and Raleigh finds particular comfort in French cuisine and music. Home life got difficult in his teenage years when his mother was diagnosed and subsequently died of lung cancer from life long heavy smoking. Following her death his father Richard abandoned his children in their home town of Anchorage, Alaska in favor of starting over with a secret family he had forged with a Czech immigrant during their stay in Hungary. Raleigh’s little sister Jazmine tried to follow Richard and Raleigh was orphaned and abandoned in the same year, leaving him and his older brother Yancy to fend for themselves.

Without any family to claim them and no formal studies, the two brothers did their best to survive in a difficult situation compounded by a major world wide catastrophe. He was fifteen years old when the first kaiju breached from another dimension to attack their world and life changed forever. Because of these events he carries heavy baggage surrounding home and family and abandonment. He feels too deeply and is afraid of getting hurt so prefers to keep relationships surface level because when he lets someone in, he really lets them in and is devastated when it doesn’t work out. This affects his love life as well. Raleigh is careful and cautious after a disastrous first love as a young boy when he fell for the daughter of his father’s foreman. They were found out and humiliated. Richard Becket lost his job on the project due to poor performance and absence but blamed his son for the loss instead and Raleigh has never quite been able to let that go.

Despite all the pain in early life he is driven by the want to help people. Be a leader. Do Good. He is given an opportunity to do this when he and his brother apply to the Jaeger Program to fight kaiju in giant mechs. He finds out later that Yancy really only wanted the uniform to pick up girls and didn’t think they had much hope of passing the recruit exam but they do and rise to the ranks of 1st and 2nd Lieutenant respectively. And, more importantly, it turns out they have one very unique skill. They are Drift Compatible: able to connect to a jaeger and each other via neural bridge. After intense training they are assigned the American jaeger Gipsy Danger stationed at the Alaskan Shatterdome affectionately called The Icebox.

Being a Jaeger Pilot is a dream come true for a guy like Raleigh who until then was lacking any real purpose in life. He grew up feeling small and being a celebrity pilot makes him feel anything but that. Even with his fame he still struggles to form relationships and oftentimes misses out by moving too slow. Once his brother thought he was taking too long to ask a girl out so he poached her to teach Raleigh a lesson.

Raleigh is excitable, boundless, reckless and rash in his decision making which is tempered by his older, sliiiightly wiser brother. The two are scrappy, resourceful fighters and often get involved in fights they have nothing to do with in order to fight the little guy’s corner. They value human life over protocol and ultimately that’s what gets Yancy killed when they disobey direct orders on a mission in order to save a fishing boat under threat of kaiju.

Yancy is ripped out of their jaeger mid drift and Raleigh feels every, excruciating second of his brother dying as though it were himself.

After that, Raleigh is drummed out of the corps, refuses Yancy’s life insurance payout and disappears. He bounces around the world a little bit before relocating to the very coastline where Yancy died to work on the anti kaiju coastal wall as a welder at height. In an effort to exhaust himself enough to sleep he exercises obsessively and works as much as he can. He takes dangerous assignments at the top of the wall and gets a double shift but is unsuccessful in his bid for a triple. A high risk job gets the best war rations but he does so 1) because being up so high reminds him of being in a jaeger and 2) he likes the adrenaline and sort of hopes that he may eventually fall. Raleigh is a man begging for death but unable to go through with it.

He sinks into a deep, deep depression and is plagued by insomnia and incredible pain from nerve damage received during the fight that got Yancy killed. Even though the decision to save the boat was joint, Raleigh blames himself for his brother’s death and will continue to do so until his last breath. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t eat, he drinks too much and shuts himself off from the world.

Yancy’s death makes him cold and mean as he rededicates his life to numbing himself as much as possible. He loves art and literature. He loves history with a special focus on the second world war. He listens obsessively to The Beatles, especially Blackbird which resonates strongly with his depression. A talented linguist, Raleigh speaks five languages and devours Rosetta Stone courses in his spare time but barely puts this skill to use.

Raleigh stays in the Now. Not in a peaceful way but in an obstinate, almost therapeutic way. He runs from the past- constantly- haunted by it.

He is sentimental and carries a collection of photographs with him wherever he goes. Despite everything that happened with Yancy, he kept a bag packed and ready to go back to service in his work locker for five years hoping someday he would get his shot at redemption. He is uncomfortable being in debt or being seen as charity and is reluctant to accept kindness because he is in need as he feels like he's being pitied. He is an eye for an eye kind of guy. He wants his ledger balanced. A Sagittarius ruled by the planet Mars.

Raleigh is guided by his desire to be A Hero and Leader. He is Kind and compassionate but can be obsessive and mean with a hair trigger temper. He is observant and a physical communicator over a verbal one, often going days without speaking. He believes he is happiest when he’s left alone and enjoys people watching with a cold beer in hand but he’s a sucker for sunshine, candy, and the burn of cold morning air in his lungs. He wants more than anything to be able to heal and put Yancy to rest but there is a hole in his soul in the shape of his brother and redemption is slow as he has lost sight of a future where he could possibly be happy.

In moments of crisis he is a quick thinker and creative problem solver but struggles to keep his cool under moments of stress unless he is in a position of assisting another person. If he has a focus he immediately channels everything into them, protecting, teaching, guiding. He would rather praise then be praised. He would rather give things away than loan them. He would rather lead by lifting someone else up into their own success.

Under all his spitting and hissing and Leave Me Alone, he really does thrive with soft, earnest companionship. He is an old soul and hopeless romantic with a love of old movies and poetry. He is loyal and brave, resourceful, trustworthy and compassionate but in the same breath he is withdrawn, impulsive, an adrenaline junkie and often puts himself and others in danger in an attempt to do good. He loves humanity but hates people. He avoids caffeine but has a sugar addiction and favorites boiled, brightly colored sweets. His pockets are filled with wrappers that he nervously toys with to quell his anxiety.

By the end of the movie he is given his shot at redemption when he is brought back to the corps to pilot a now fully restores Gipsy Danger and rediscovers his willingness to let someone into his heart in the form of his new drift partner Mako Mori. She earns his trust and he proves to her that he isn't just an old has-been. Together they escort the jaeger Striker Eureka (piloted by father/son team Herc and Chuck Hansen) to the interdimensional breach on a bomb run to save their world. Striker's payload is damaged in the penultimate fight and they self destruct in order to clear a path for Gipsy Danger to finish the job who are critically injured but manage to complete the mission. Raleigh sends Mako back to the surface in an escape pod after giving her his remaining oxygen and disconnects to manually overrides Gipsy's self destruct. As far as he is concerned he has done his job and it's okay if he dies because he has finally been able to close his own story.

As he floats through the portal between dimensions with his own oxygen fatally low he barely manages to get into his own escape pod. He sees the otherworldly shapes of the other universe. He feels the pressure of the explosion beneath his pod as his jaeger explodes. He passes out and wakes up in a clean bed in an empty house with faint music playing somewhere in the background and a blessing basket on the kitchen table...

Given the opportunity and under the stress of existing in Deerington, Raleigh will quickly find that he can not survive alone and will be forced to find alliances and be vulnerable in order to do so. Given his canon point he has only just begun to heal from his trauma and open himself up to the concept of letting people back into his heart. His fragile mental state, guilt, nightmares and insomnia will make him a particularly easy target in Deerington’s dreamscape setting.


Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:
Strengths: Drift Compatibility, Jaeger piloting, Jaeger Bushido (A form of military mixed martial arts), boxing, special skill in building/construction/welding
Weaknesses: Struggles with depression and survivor’s guilt. Impulsive, hot tempered, reckless. Suffers with long term nerve damage/pain which has recently been added to.

Inventory:
Lighter
Pocket knife (leatherman)
Stack of photographs kept wound up with earbuds
A manual Leica camera +kit (x12 rolls of empty film, carry case, strap, lenses)
Welder’s propane blowtorch +kit (solder, goggles, extra bottle of gas)
Flare gun with x30 flares



Writing Samples:
TDM top level | TDM thread

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Andi
Player Age: 30+
Player Contact: Plurk homocop

Other Characters In Game: N/A
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Raleigh Becket: Andi
Permissions for Character: Permissions Post
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes, gimmie
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Oh man. Just. Fucking all of it. Raleigh is particularly good for psychological, body horror, mind fuck, hallucinations, hauntings, ALL THE THINGS. I mean monsters and fighting too but I live for the mindfuck.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: No
Additional Information: Because Feels