App (ryslig)

[bollinger]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Joey
Contact: thlayli
Age: 29
Other Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Alex Drake
Age: 36
Canon: Ashes to Ashes
Canon Point: 2x08, post-blag
Character Information: Here! (Spoiler marking feels over cautious for a show that ended over a decade ago, but it genuinely does benefit from going in blind if you do watch it.)

Personality:

If you were to meet Alex Drake on her best days you would see a confident, intelligent woman with a sharp wit and an indomitable drive to achieve her goals. A little odd, perhaps, but with an uncanny ability to read people and understand how their mind works. This doesn't come out of nowhere. Alex is both a Detective Inspector and a psychological profiler. She's been fascinated by the human mind since she was young, and has worked hard to make a name for herself in her field. In a number of ways she is privileged. She had access to private education and attended a prestigious university after undergoing her police training at Hendon. She even had a secondment to the CIA at one point in her career, which she credits as being the place she learned a number of her profiling techniques. Of course, she still put in a lot of work to get to those places. She always has. Her parents died when she was only 8, but even before then she was expected to be unusually self-sufficient. She was never truly left on her own, but her parents were busy with work and political activism. She was often left behind at school with no one but her teachers, expected to study even on occasions that should have been spent as family.

She is a mother now herself, but while she's career driven, she also makes sure she prioritises her daughter. She has effectively always been a single parent, but never wants Molly to experience the distant childhood she herself had. It's a source of irritation that her ex-husband consistently pays so little attention to Molly. She wants her little girl to be able to have a relationship with her parents. It's cruel fate, then, that Alex is now fighting for her own life after being shot in 2008. Alex knows the pain of losing a parent, and come hell or high water she's determined not to let Molly experience that too.

Her fight for survival takes an unusual form. When she wakes up after the shooting she finds herself in 1981, assigned the role of a newly transferred Detective Inspector among a team whose names she already knows from studying the case file of Sam Tyler, a police officer whose mind had constructed an entire fantasy world whilst in a coma a few years prior. Naturally, this leads her to believe she's in a similar situation and her mind has taken the liberty of borrowing the characters he'd told her about. There are some things that seem to lend credibility to this theory. Alex still hears voices from the real world, and experiences hallucinations that seem to be clues aimed to either help or hinder her from waking up. Although she believes it to be fake, she can't help but marvel at how realistic everything feels, and after almost a year and a half she genuinely does care about her team. Part of her wants to think what she's experiencing is real, and the people she's come to consider her friends will be able to carry on existing without her when she leaves them. She even goes so far as to write them letters filled with her observations and advice for after she's gone. Some of them are a little condescending, but they're heartfelt none the less. Once upon a time she didn't care what they thought, but after spending so much time living and working with them they've crept into her affections. She's become the team mother instead of simply their reluctant second in command, and has also grown to be a role model to some of them. This is particularly true with Shaz, who looks up to her as a woman who holds a position of power in a profession so dominated by men.

That's not to say things are always harmonious. To the contrary, Alex frequently butts heads with those around her. Either because of their backwards mindsets, poor standards of practice, or she thinks they're approaching a case from the wrong direction. Even in a world she believes is in her mind, Alex takes it upon herself to be a champion for the underdogs. She'll always side with marginalised victims that her colleagues have a habit of dismissing or looking down on, to the point where she can be blinded by them herself despite her skills in profiling. She has a strong desire to help others that contributed to her decision to join the force in the first place.

She has a tendency to always believe she's in the right, and it takes a great deal to convince her she might not be. Part of it is being from the future, but another reason is she considers herself to be more intelligent than the rest of them. As a result of this she can be patronising, talking down to the others when they either don't understand or disagree with her. She gets frustrated at their ignorance when it comes to her specialities, to the point where she automatically tries to correct them even in the rare event they get it right. She most frequently finds herself at odds with Gene, her superior officer, who she appears to love and loathe in equal measures. She has come to learn that Gene does usually have the right intentions even if it doesn't always appear that way on the surface. Even so, she more often than not finds herself on the opposite side to him. She vehemently disagrees with his old school methods of solving problems and makes no secret of it. She undermines him, disobeys him, and on one occasion even gets him suspended so she can gain full control of their investigation. When they do find common ground they're near unstoppable, but because of their many differences it's easy to sow the seeds of distrust between them. The one time Alex decides to bare her soul and tell him the full truth of her situation it drives an almost catastrophic wedge between them, Gene unable to see it as anything but Alex making a mockery of him.

It's not hard to see where he's coming from with this. Time travel is impossible. Why would he believe her? Why would anyone? Even though she's found a place for herself in this decade, there's so much she can never properly confide in to anyone. Her already confusing situation is not helped by the hallucinations she continues to experience. This, along with her references to the future, or allusions that things aren't real tends to leave even those who like her feeling as though she's slightly loopy. She's developed a dry sense of humour in response, enjoying referencing things she knows full well she's the only one who understands, something that only exacerbates her reputation as an eccentric.

Most of the time she's learned to mask the reality of where she's really from. She can understand all too well that it's too much to comprehend for anyone else. She is open about her intentions to leave, particularly when she thinks she might be close to waking up, but she tends to leave her explanations vague. It's better that she works on it alone, as she has since the first day she arrived. Much of what little free time she has outside of work is spent going over whatever avenue she can think of to get herself back there. She waits for messages from home, or for visions of her daughter. Sometimes she'll hear the voices of her doctors telling her about the surgery to remove the bullet, or how her recovery is going. She records her thoughts on these as well as whatever is going on around her on a tape recorder to analyse later, keeping up this habit throughout her increasingly long stay in the past.

5-10 Key Character Traits:

‣ Determined
‣ Analytical
‣ Compassionate
‣ Argumentative
‣ Stubborn
‣ Confident
‣ Maternal
‣ Independent
‣ Patronising
‣ Wry

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits
Opt-Outs: Demon, Goblin, Simulacrum, Vampire, Slime, Werewolf

Roleplay Sample: Fourthwall toplevel + thread