Application | rubycity_rp

[ragazzina]

PLAYER
Name: Alex
Age: 18+
Personal Journal: alexclusive
E-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/etc: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai

CHARACTER
Name: Suzie Quatro
Canon: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency
Age: Approximately 18 or 19
Timeline: The end of Episode 18, when she's recovering from being possessed by Esidisi, and has just said goodbye to Our Heroes™ as they embark for Switzerland.

Note: If possible, I'd like to app her as a light CRAU from Drift Fleet, in which she had the exact same canonpoint but spent a few months in-game there, so canonically still the end of Episode 18, but for her it's been a few months now past that point.


Items with character at canon point:
The clothes on her back, the flowers in her hair, a few assorted jewelry and trinket items as souvenirs from Outer Space, a nice red dress, and a small white puppy named Cloudy.


If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?:
Suzie and Reimi have absolutely no knowledge of each other and no particular reason to interact, so keeping them apart is fairly easy. Suzie at this canonpoint has no knowledge of Jotaro (since for her, he won't even be born for another 30 years), and while Jotaro does have knowledge of Suzie, at this age he has a few reasons to want to keep his distance from her. One is that he's getting fatigued on his Super Huge Family showing up in general; another is that historically he's tried to give the women in his family a lot more space than the men (as seen in how he'd given Lisa Lisa a wide berth and actively kept his distance from Erina because he didn't know how to explain who he was to her or how to keep from upsetting her very well, so he chose to just avoid her). Personality-wise, they're also not very compatible; Suzie is energetic, vivacious, and bubbly, and girls like that have a tendency to stress him out and emotionally exhaust him — and being that he's related to and actually likes this one in the future, he'd much sooner try to avoid her than run the risk of getting frustrated and blowing up at her. He's also unlikely to worry about going out of his way to protect her when she has other CR in the City (namely Joseph and Caesar) who would be far more immediately inclined to look out for her, which would be fine with Jotaro anyway because that frees him up to take care of other equally important people (like his mother) in a crisis.

While I do have to say that it's incredibly unlikely that Suzie and Jotaro won't have awareness of each other while in-game, and while some (obviously handwaved) interactions are probably going to be a given necessity, it's also very plausible that those interactions will be largely superficial for the above-stated reasons, and Suzie will neither be living in the same residence as Jotaro nor crossing paths with him all that often.


Personality:
In comparison to most of the characters in Battle Tendency, Suzie Quatro is almost refreshingly average. A native Italian girl in the flower of her youth, Suzie is charming, bubbly, vivacious, and unrepentantly sweet in character. Though she's not without her faults — flightiness, naivete, and a touch of being easily startled among them — Suzie is fundamentally a good and decent girl who cares deeply about the people who are important to her, and works hard as best she can on their behalf. Though she knows her talents and skills only run to the mundane, while at the same time she's surrounded by people whose gifts are undeniably special and supernatural, Suzie never seems self-conscious or jealous of the talented people around her; rather, she's more the sort of person who has found her niche in the world and is content to fill it to the very best of her ability. She gets along well with others, likes to flirt and be flirted with, and is unafraid to give as good as she gets when it comes to trading wit with one of the boys — particularly Joseph.

However, naivete and flightiness should not be confused for incompetence; on the contrary, Suzie is implicitly shown to be both hardworking and highly competent in her role as Lisa Lisa's assistant (and presumably, estate manager), being afforded a fair amount of personal autonomy in overseeing the running of Air Supplena island. Presumably, she and Lisa Lisa form a highly functional unit in this respect: though the island is indisputably under Lisa Lisa's control and command, Suzie takes on the everyday responsibilities of keeping the estate running smoothly to allow Lisa Lisa the freedom to focus on much more specialized considerations, like the training of the Hamon warriors that come to her. She cheerfully oversees even routine, mundane tasks, and always seems to have a smile on her face when she is around her fellow residents of Air Supplena island. Furthermore, she takes her duties seriously and seems to place a considerable amount of importance on carrying them out properly. Though played in canon for somewhat comedic effect, she fusses at length over the task of helping Lisa Lisa pick out a blouse to wear, and when asked for her opinion between two possible choices, she's quick to point out the merits of each possibility, without ever bringing up detriments of either choice: the white blouse, she notes, is "clean and refreshing", but the patterned blouse is "colorful and fun". And as she deliberates, it quickly becomes apparent that the fundamental criteria for her attempts at choosing are ones that have Lisa Lisa's interests in mind, as she mentions having difficulty deciding "which is better" — and thus, clearly wanting her employer to have the best she can offer.

Even so, Suzie is not without her weaknesses. Following her possession by Esidisi, it is almost certain that her upbeat, cheery demeanor is being fueled by her determination to keep her spirits up despite the horrors she's endured, and occasionally those spirits do falter and crack. Having been at least semiconscious for the entirety of the fight between Esidisi and the Hamon trio, Suzie witnessed her body being used to threaten and harm the people she cares about most, as well as being used herself as a hostage against them. More than once, Esidisi threatened the trio with her demise, either at their hands or his own, and on at least one occasion that demise seemed reasonably imminent. As such, despite her determination to keep her chin up and carry on, Suzie has her moments of insecurity, shyness, and a profound need for security and comfort. Furthermore, it is possible that the encounter with Esidisi wasn't the first time in her personal history that Suzie has felt isolated and victimized, given the way Caesar reacts to Esidisi using her body to cry and plead, "Save me, please, everyone picks on me, but you won't, will you, Caesar?" While it's possible that this was simply a well-targeted ruse on Esidisi's part, Caesar's reaction might also suggest that Esidisi's ploy wasn't the first time he'd heard "Suzie" confess such feelings, which in turn raises implications about the circumstances that led her to accept employment with Lisa Lisa (a somewhat unusual personal choice for a girl of marriageable age in Italy in the 1930s) in the first place.

However, on the whole, Suzie is quite simply a decent, hardworking girl with a lot of charisma and a hardworking nature, who cares deeply about people and always tries her best. Though on the surface she can seem flighty, forgetful, and generally flippant, her appearances in later installments of canon suggest that she is considerably more perceptive than she lets on, particularly where her friends and family are concerned. Even when her loved ones keep things from her because they're concerned she can't handle them or will take them badly, Suzie often guesses or figures them out on her own, and simply keeps quiet about it herself without pressing the issue with them. Occasionally, she will even take her own personal steps to address the problem they're not telling her, determined to see things through (and proving by example that she's more resilient than people sometimes perceive her to be). Family is also incredibly important to her; she's clearly a romantic, loves with abandon, and takes things like infidelity incredibly hard — which in part might presumably tie back into her insecurities regarding loneliness, but also simply because she is a self-possessed girl with strong ideas of how people ought to be treated, and refuses to be a pushover if she feels she's been slighted, had her trust betrayed, or been mistreated in an emotional capacity.

▶▶▶ Drift Fleet Development:
To be perfectly honest, there's not a lot to add here that isn't already covered above; Suzie wasn't in Drift Fleet all that long, and so the developments she had on a personality level are somewhat minor. Perhaps the most notable different from her with her game development as opposed to canon is that she'll feel more comfortable with the idea of being brought to a jamjar in the first place — given that she's done it once already, when she was brought to the Fleet, and thus won't have to work through the typical "where am I, what's happened to me" reaction nearly so much as she otherwise might. She's also more emotionally reliant on Joseph and Caesar (which I've talked to their players about in advance, and they are comfortable with!), but at the same time she's somewhat more personally stable and independent, because living in the fleet tended to encourage the development of her personal agency.

So effectively, even after Drift Fleet, Suzie is still largely Suzie; she'll just be somewhat more chill about the prospect of coming to a jamjar, and will more easily fit in to her new circumstances without a lot of the jarring difficulties of trying to adjust to Ruby City versus her canon circumstances.

Background:
Because Suzie Q is a somewhat minor character in Battle Tendency, what we know of her personal history is unfortunately relatively short. We know she's approximately eighteen or nineteen years old, Italian-born, and serves as Lisa Lisa's personal assistant on Air Supplena island, which is located thirty minutes by boat off the shores of Venice. It's also clear that she's been Lisa Lisa's assistant for quite some time, given the level of trust that Lisa Lisa places in her. Suzie's presence is portrayed as a natural facet of Lisa Lisa's daily life, and her duties appear to extend to estate management of Air Supplena island in general, above and beyond that of an average maid. Though some of the tasks she deals with are undeniably mundane, such as doing laundry, overseeing the mail, or cleaning up minor spills and accidents, others are indicative of far more than even an average personal assistant, such as managing Lisa Lisa's personal wardrobe and helping to coordinate even such things as her daily attire. Suzie is also granted a high level of personal familiarity and entrusted with a generous amount of closeness to Lisa Lisa; though she always respectfully refers to employer as "Madame", she is permitted far more leeway into Lisa Lisa's privacy than most people, including but not limited to the liberty to be present and converse with her while she relaxes and bathes.

At her current canonpoint, Suzie's most notable piece of history occurs when she is possessed by Esidisi after Joseph fights him on Air Supplena island. Canon indicates that Suzie is still "mostly alive" during this period and at least somewhat aware of the goings-on around her; however, she is decidedly not in control of her own body or voice, and is in fact used as a human puppet in order to carry out Esidisi's nefarious ends. Under his control, she is forced to steal Lisa Lisa's priceless artifact, the Red Stone of Aja, and mails it to Switzerland where Esidisi's fellow Pillar Man companions are waiting. Then, with the artifact on its way, Esidisi returns in Suzie's body to stall and hold off Joseph, Caesar, and Lisa Lisa, until such time as the package can travel far enough to be sufficiently lost from their control.

During this possession, Suzie ends up wounded and almost certainly traumatized, but quick thinking on the part of Joseph arrives at a solution to remove Esidisi from her body without inadvertently killing her as well. Following this, Lisa Lisa is able to retrieve the destination of the Red Stone from Suzie's subconscious memories, and as she, Joseph, and Caesar set off to retrieve it, Suzie is present to say goodbye to them, during which Joseph teases her and makes her promise to recover from her wounds while they're gone.

This is the point at which I would be choosing to take Suzie from; however, for the sake of thoroughness, I'll touch on her final canon appearance as well!

At the end of the series, Suzie reappears as Joseph's newlywed wife, having spent two weeks nursing him back to health in Venice after the events of his battle with Kars. She travels with Joseph to America, where they are reunited with the rest of his surviving family and friends, and later she and Joseph are shown on a boat with Lisa Lisa, who is moving to California from Venice. However, Suzie and Joseph end up settling in New York City, where Joseph becomes a real estate mogul, Suzie ends up a socialite queen, and they eventually have a daughter named Holly.

▶▶▶ Drift Fleet Development:
Suzie arrived in the Fleet in late November/early December of 2015, so she was in the game approximately four or five months. As a courtesy to the players of other characters in Ruby City, I have no intention of causing her to keep her previous game CR, save for that of her more developed relationship with Joseph and Caesar, which I have already spoken with those players about in advance. This is reasonably feasible and believable in an IC way, because in Drift Fleet Suzie was subject to a game mechanic called an Augment, which was known to sometimes malfunction in various ways, including but not limited to removing memories. Therefore, I'm happy with assuming that Suzie no longer has her Augment, and that its removal took with it most of her concrete memories of the people she met in the Fleet, so as to avoid the issue of her recognizing any characters that may have been in both games (save, again, Joseph and Caesar).

In the time that she spent in the Fleet, Suzie worked as an engineer on one of the small spaceships that made up the fleet, which she also called her home. She visited a handful of planets, including one Hoth-like planet consisting of essentially nothing but snow, a space station focused on tourism and commerce, and a small polluted moon that posed a health hazard to anyone not wearing a full-face mask. She had beginner's lessons in how to fly a space shuttle (by necessity of the game environment), and also acquired some knowledge of modern technology and robotics by virtue of her Engineering augment, which gave her immediate training in the sciences and disciplines necessary to allow her to do her job maintaining various aspects of the spaceship she worked and lived on as an engineer.

Abilities:
Canonically, Suzie is a pretty average human being with no particular supernatural skills of note (unlike most other people from her canon). As such, her skills are all mundane things like estate management, knowing how to cook, and so on. She is also most likely fluent in both Italian and English.

In the Fleet, she picked up a handful of other, potentially more versatile and useful skills; if possible I'd like her to keep her Augment-induced training in robotics, electronics, and general machine repair, as well as her beginner's familiarity with the operation of spacecraft, if only because she really doesn't have that many articulated character skills canonically, and I think that the unexpectedness of a middle-class Italian girl from the 1930s who's also familiar with spaceships and the construction of droids would be a lot of fun to play around with. Obviously there's no telling how much good that'll do her in the magical world of Ruby City itself, but you know.


Network/Actionspam Sample:
Temporarily locked out of her bank account, Suzie finds a job singing in a nightclub on the tourist trap station!


Prose Log Sample:
Things Suzie was definitely going down to the planet for: medicine, perishable foodstuffs, little luxury items that will make a stay in space nicer during the periods when they're not in a planetary system.

Things Suzie was definitely not going down to the planet expecting: weird white doglike animals leaving tracks in the snow.

Part of her knows that she's in no condition to go chasing after wild animals (or at least, actually nondomesticated wild animals, not the "wild" ones like the foxes are), and that she wouldn't be on her best of days, much less when she's suffering from the lingering effects of a cold and already at a disadvantage in the chill and the snow. But there's something about the sight of the animal that strikes her as sad; maybe it's the way it's avoiding people, or maybe it's the way it's so thin, but somehow the word lonely ends up attributed to the sight of it and, well, softhearted Suzie can't bear that for long.

So she thinks about it a little, and eventually before she thinks better of it she heads off to the settlement's markets and comes back with a package of raw meat wrapped up in brown paper and string, which ends up cut into wide strips and arranged as best she can on a sheet of cardboard in the hopes of keeping it a little dry from the surrounding snow.

And out it goes, into the field as far as she's willing to brave going (which really isn't all that far, but it's enough that the creature won't have to come too close to civilization for it, maybe), because maybe it won't do much but the least she can do is hope that the weird scraggly dog-animal will be able to find one thing to eat, for one day at least.

Sometimes, you can't do a whole lot, but the little things, those make a difference sometimes, too. That's what she tells herself, anyway, and resolves to check back on the little offering later.