fade rift | application 2.0

[levered]

PLAYER

Name: mj
Age: 31
Contact: unbeliever
Other Characters: Alistair, Kostos, Jehan (side), Silas (side)
Interests: A rifter! Finally!

CHARACTER

Name: Clarke Griffin
Canon/OC: The 100
Canon Point: Mid 5.13, pre waking up
Journal: levered
Age: 24

Canon World

The 100 is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the only survivors following global nuclear war are the rare humans able to adapt to life on a radiation-saturated Earth and the descendants of astronauts and space station scientists who assembled various stations into a conglomerate Ark. (There were also some descendants of politicians protected in an underground bunker, now all dead, and more recently some prisoners sent in cryo sleep to explore and mine distant planets.) The series covers several years of shifting alliances and conflict between groups who view survival on Earth as a zero sum game, then a five-year time skip, then more of that conflict. Other features include questionable science and constant hard decisions about who lives and who dies, often involving levers.

History

Clarke on the wiki.

Clarke was born in space and was raised in comparative privilege. When her father discovered that life support on the Ark would fail, he attempted to publicize it and Clarke tried to help, leading to his execution and her year-long stint in solitary confinement. She was then sent to Earth (along with 99 juvenile delinquents and 1 Bellamy) as a way to test its survivability. She and Bellamy immediately butted heads—Bellamy fostered anarchy, Clarke yelled at people about being responsible—but they eventually became co-leaders and united everyone against the Grounders, who had survived on Earth since it was wrecked and formed a new society in the ashes. A lot of people died.

The war with the Grounders ended in an uneasy truce when they found a common enemy in Mount Weather, whose inhabitants could not survive on the surface without using the blood or bone marrow of people who could withstand the radiation. The alliance was contingent on the execution of Clarke's boyfriend, who she killed to spare him being tortured. She went on to make some shady but necessary decisions with the Grounders' Commander, such as choosing not to warn their own people of an impending attack to hide the fact that they had an inside source. But in the end Lexa struck a deal to save her people and leave Clarke's behind, and Clarke, Bellamy, and Monty irradiated the population of Mount Weather to keep them alive.

Clarke was mega sad about her role in this and wandered into the woods to be filthy and fight panthers, but eventually was drug back out—by Lexa, attempting to protect her—and wound up forging a formal alliance and making out with her until her stupid accidental death. In the meantime there was some business with Ice Nation taking command and the AI that had started the first nuclear war infiltrating people's brains, which Clarke stopped, but only after finding out that a second apocalypse would occur in the near future.

There was no stopping that from happening, in the end, and only a limited amount of space for survivors in an underground bunker. A few more people escaped back to the hub of the Ark in space, and Clarke was left behind on Earth, outside the bunker. She survived the radiation due to artificial experimental changes to her blood. There was one other known survivor, a little girl named Madi, who Clarke adopted and raised alone in the one survivable valley on Earth for five years before everyone else came back, plus brand new people: prisoners previously in cryo sleep after sent to mine planets outside the solar system. But they were totally cool and everyone got along great with no more fighting.

Jk. Those in the bunker and the prisoners immediately began trying to kill one another, while Clarke tried to stop them but even more so tried to protect Madi, who was eligible to challenge the new commander Octavia and inherit Lexa's position due to her blood. Everything went horribly, and the survivors wound up escaping Earth altogether and going into cryo.

Personality

Clarke's first instinct has always been to protect people, however she defines that and however she personally thinks they need to be protected: from being willing to defy the law on the Ark to help her father warn everyone about the impending failure of the life support systems, to yelling at the 100 about everything they needed to do to stay alive and to help those on the Ark stay alive, too, to killing nearly a thousand people so far in pursuit of saving her own.

She used to cry about it, to believe there was such a thing as good guys and bad guys and that she was failing to be the good one, but in recent years she's learned to be at peace with her own ruthlessness. People are animals—but, like, in a zen way—and when resources are finite, everyone has an equally valid claim to the right to survive. She doesn't blame people for being willing to kill to live. She doesn't blame herself for killing them first.

In addition to murder, she's no-nonsense about most things, tending to say exactly what she thinks unless there's some strategic reason to withhold it and not exhibiting a ton of patience for what she perceives as bullshit or wasted time. But a lot of that is because she spends so much time in situations where there isn't time to waste. She used to like games—chess, video games, drinking games—and shows an occasional flash of good humor and cocky eyebrow raises even during the constant stream of life-or-death situations she finds herself in. Given five years of relative peace and isolation, she fills walls with art and lets her kid dye red streaks into her hair. She's a hugger. She has a gentle bedside manner when she can afford to, up to and including humming to someone and stroking their hair while she has to euthanize them.

She's smart and calculating, but she isn't cold by nature, only to the extent she's learned to be. She can shoot someone in the head at point blank range without flinching, and when she has to choose between people she does it with as little hesitation as she can, but she'll still tear up from time to time, and she cares intensely about people. Just in tiers. She spent the last five years focused entirely on ensuring one other person's safety, leaving her bonds with everyone else and humanity in general on shakier ground, and she'll still need some time to unlearn that. She's also used to being in charge, not because of charisma or persuasiveness, but because she identifies what needs to be done with somewhat above-average accuracy, then ensures that it happens with exemplary determination and minimal regard for rules or her own wellbeing. Following orders she doesn't agree with and thinking on a continent-sized level instead of only about the people she winds up considering hers won't come naturally, if they come at all.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Finn says early on that Clarke is lousy with a spear, but sneaky. The second part remains true: she's an underhanded and improvisational fighter, most often stabbing, shooting, or bludgeoning people who are incapacitated or not expecting it, or rigging up traps and explosions to handle the killing for her. The first part is no longer true: after her time on Earth, she can win knife fights against panthers and hit a moving fish with a spear, and while she's never actually seen wielding a sword herself and probably isn't the greatest at it, someone had to teach Madi how to kick the other twelve year olds' asses at sword school. She probably isn't someone who should be sent into the frontlines of an open battle, but she could hold her own with native rogues.

She isn't a doctor, and whether or not she knows how to do something depends fairly haphazardly on whether she's seen it done before, but she's about on the level of an advanced paramedic or combat medic, able to do things like stitch wounds and apply basic medical principles to unfamiliar poisons or illnesses. Survival skills like hunting, fishing, trapping, scavenging, finding fresh water, reading maps and navigating, and overall winning at Man vs Radioactive Nature are also all very much in her wheelhouse.

Other than that, she's a vanilla human with no supernatural abilities and a tendency to be bullheaded, ruthless, and overly narrow in her focus.

Suggested Nerfs

N/A

Arrival Inventory

• Apocalypse chic clothing, including leather pants (!), boots, a jacket made of garbage in a cool way.
• And bejeweled (not quite really) fingerless gloves she thought she lost a long time ago.
• Her sniper rifle, which can totally be busted and without bullets—I just want the strap and the scope.
• A crate of sealed containers holding eggs that might hatch into skin-burrowing parasitic worms.
• A sketchbook filled with a mix of looseleaf and bound pages, featuring things she's drawn and things she definitely has not.

'Human'ization

She has medically-induced "nightblood" that's black instead of red and allows her to withstand high levels of radiation, which wouldn't serve any purpose here anyway, so that can be put back to normal!

Fit

As you may know, I tried Clarke here in the past as an AU and could never hit a good stride, but I think she'll be easier and more fun as a rifter. Despite being sci-fi she's used to low-tech survival, so it won't be that hard a transition for her to make, and she's also used to ruthlessness and authoritarianism being the standard for everyone from government leaders on down, with civil liberties as a luxury at best, which I think could give her some different opinions and perspectives compared to a lot of rifters.

SAMPLES

QUARANTINE

The Gallows aren't dark and quiet at night. She can see lights flickering beneath the heavy doors in the hallways, hear snatches of conversation echoing off the stone walls around corners and in the stairwells—signs of people who do not sleep because their war is not sleeping, either. But the fortress is darker, quieter, and her boots are made with rubber soles too worn to squeak. She makes it to the door unnoticed.

"Don't be locked," she orders the handle in a whisper.

It's locked.

If she can even pick the sort of locks they have in wherever-the-hell, she wouldn't be able to do it quickly enough to avoid being seen. So it's not out of the question, but it is Plan B, maybe Plan C. Plan A is trying the adjacent door. It's unlocked; it swings open on a room of crates and boxes, pitch black except for faint moonlight and the glow of windows from the residential tower outside the window—which is also unlocked.

And that's the story of how Clarke came to be hanging out six stories up the side of the Central Tower, one hand dug in against stone and the other quietly forcing open the window to the Rifts and the Veil office, shadowed but nonetheless visible from the adjacent tower if anyone living on the upper floors cares to look outside.

CRYSTAL

Can someone here do a.

[ She—a young woman, with an accent like a dwarf's for the natives or an American's for some of the rifters—pauses, because this is frustrating. All that time in Earth Skills, all that time on the ground, and now? Now, what the hell is blood lotus. ]

A survival tour for rifters? What mushrooms we shouldn't eat, what animals we shouldn't mistake for harmless.

I'm sure it's in a book, but I'm still working on your alphabet.

[ And she would like to be prepared to make a run for it soon, thanks. ]