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impermanentmarker) wrote2015-02-21 08:18 pm
impermanentmarker) wrote2015-02-21 08:18 pm
Entry tags:
Systemwide Application
UNPLUGGED
OOC
Name: QV
Age: 19
Contact details:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
questionableveracity and applestoatoms@gmail.com on AIM work equally well!
Characters already in Systemwide: None!
BASIC PROFILE
Name: Isaac Clarke
Age: 46 biologically, 49 chronologically due to three years spent in stasis
Canon: Dead Space
Appearance: Here. Caucasian male, black hair flecked with gray, height is roughly 5'8", not muscular so much as stocky.
Extraction point: End of Dead Space 3, just before the Awakened DLC
OVERVIEW
Content Warnings for: Death, Mentions of Child Death, Cults, Involuntary Medical Testing, feel free to tell me if there’s any other important ones I should tag
Personality:
Isaac is a man with a relatively straightforward personality and motivations, all told. At his core he’s a quiet person who wants nothing more than a happy family and a peaceful life, and a great deal of his general outlook stems from the great many obstacles standing between him and this humble goal. His close personal relationships or lack thereof, the incidents aboard the USG Ishimura and what came after, and his resulting exposure to the alien artifacts known as the Markers are all things that have alternatingly shaped, tempered, and broken him immeasurably as a person.
While Isaac’s personal life isn’t touched on in very much detail in canon, what few facts we are given prove telling. In terms of relationships he appears to be a person of extremes, with devotion enough to follow those he trusts to the ends of the universe at one pole, guarded suspicion at the other, and very little in between. This trend appears to start with his parents: Isaac has spent his entire adult life estranged from his mother after she sold off the family estate and devoted the whole of her being to rising through the ranks of the Church of Unitology as a way of coping with her husband’s disappearance. This not only lead to their eventual falling out and estrangement, Isaac feeling abandoned and his mother disappointed in his lack of faith, but also left him with a lifelong distrust of the church. Isaac’s father, on the other hand, disappeared suddenly when while on a mission with the Merchant Marines when Isaac was four, as mentioned above. In contrast to the resentment Isaac still harbors for his mother, however, it’s strongly implied that at least some part of his decision to join Merchant Marines himself was motivated by the desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and potentially to find out what happened to him, as it’s noted that he’s made multiple unsuccessful inquiries into the mission during which he disappeared.
This trend of all or nothing continues with his other two notable relationships: Nicole Brennan, and Ellie Langford. Nicole dies prior to the beginning of the first game and as such we only see parts of her relationship with Isaac through flashbacks and the way he speaks to his hallucinations of her, but all evidence seems to point to them being very close. Isaac’s ability to relate to others is a bit healthier here - Nicole appears to be his only real friend, but he encourages her to strive for a prestigious position as a medical officer aboard the USG Ishimura while he’s posted elsewhere. When this promotion leads to her death, however, Isaac considers himself responsible, believing that if he’d kept her close he could have saved her. His grief over the loss of Nicole and fixation on her is made manifest in both the Marker-induced hallucination of her, taunting him for his failures, and more subtly in his actions, becoming one of his driving motivations and an unhealthy obsession throughout the series.
In fact, his later relationship with fellow Necromorph outbreak survivor Ellie Langford exemplifies just how much Nicole’s death affected him. Over the course of the events aboard Titan Station, Isaac becomes very attached to her very quickly. This isn’t too out of the ordinary, as it is a survival situation and their partnership is one of necessity at the start, but as the game goes on she is explicitly compared to Nicole more and more often, culminating in Isaac telling her“I couldn’t save Nicole, but I can save you.” before attempting to sacrifice himself to give her a chance at being rescued. They both survive the incident and later enter a romantic relationship, but Ellie eventually leaves him for his inability to move on and stop treating her as a second chance rather than her own person, as well as for having “given up on the world”. This does little to temper his fixation on her. He jumps at the first opportunity to follow which, again, isn’t too out of the ordinary given that he had been told she had gone missing while trying to find a way to stop any further Necromorph outbreaks, but while his devotion was understandable his motives were more than a bit skewed. His first reaction upon finding her alive after the relief wore off was berate her for entering another relationship so soon (with the captain of the rescue mission) despite more pressing issues like being on a spaceship filled with zombies, and when their ship crashed into the frozen wasteland of a planet after a Necromorph attack he displayed concern only for her, despite having been at least on friendly terms with the rest of the crew. He does begin to grow out of this as the game goes on, striking up something of a rapport with fellow engineer Jennifer Santos and rescue team member John Carver over the course of the mission, but his primary devotion and highest loyalty remain to Ellie until the end.
As for his experiences aboard the Ishimura and everything afterwards, likely the most striking of the lasting effects are his severe PTSD coupled with his Marker-induced madness. The PTSD is pretty self-explanatory, with Isaac having survived two separate Necromorph outbreaks by way of being forced to put down the twisted, reanimated corpses of men, women and children alike, witnessing the gruesome deaths of countless people - many of whom he knew personally - along the way. In addition to the general combat related triggers - gunfire, screaming, conditions that resemble those aboard the Ishimura or Titan station - being used repeatedly and against his will by Unitologist forces posing as allies and EarthGov itself alike has left him with an intense wariness of absolutely anybody claiming to try to help him, especially when it comes to anything having to do with the Markers. The madness, described as “dementia” by the game, is more along the lines of standard Hollywood-style dangerous insanity, with vivid hallucinations (often of lost loved ones), violent urges, and, most importantly, a nearly irresistible compulsion to build more Markers. Isaac’s psyche is impressively resilient, and he’s able to keep composed under most circumstances and recognize his hallucinations for what they are when he has them, which was rarely by the end of Dead Space 3, but certain situations can cause him to act before thinking, and he no longer feels safe unless armed.
In summary, Isaac Clarke is a largely passive person, preferring to react rather than take initiative. His actions are almost exclusively driven by his relationships with others, following those few he considers himself close to with undying loyalty and resisting everyone else with a powerful sort of obstinance. He is remarkably intelligent and resourceful, and at the start of the series was largely pleasant and mild-mannered, if a bit quiet, but his experiences over the course of the past several years have turned him much more suspicious and hostile, essentially putting him into a permanent “fight or flight” mentality.
Matrix:
Wiki Link (Note that the above content warnings all apply to this link in force. Note also that the events of Dead Space 3 vary slightly depending on whether it is played singleplayer or co-op. This iteration of Isaac assumes singleplayer.)
The year is 2514, and humanity is on the brink of collapse. The state of the human race is this: Earth has long since been stripped bare of resources - its oil reserves long gone, its ice caps melted, and all but the hardiest of species extinct. Centuries in the past, the governments of the world unified and took to the stars, founding colonies on other planets and moons to harvest their mineral wealth and sustain the still-growing demands of the population. This worked, for a time. The colonies rebelled once, overworked and mistreated by their motherland, but were quickly brought back into the fold by EarthGov's superior firepower. Mining and spacefaring technology advanced to the point where massive ships called planet-crackers could be commissioned and deployed to distant worlds, cutting them open and systematically rendering them down to their component parts to fuel civilization for another day.
Despite having the whole of the galaxy at their fingertips, however, humanity's growth continued to outstrip its ability to provide for itself. By the 26th century poverty and scarcity were once again rampant, with the majority of the population living in crowded slums and eating only carefully rationed supplies. Facing the grim future with little hope of help from the government, a growing number of people turned to one of mankind’s oldest comforts: religion.
The dominant religion in Dead Space’s modern day is Unitology - an organization only 200 years old but massive and influential enough that it rivals and even sometimes eclipses EarthGov in terms of political clout. Unitology is a faith centered around worship of an alien artifact discovered in the Chixulub crater in 2215. The central tenet of the Unitologist faith revolves around the idea that this artifact, known as the Marker, was a gift from a higher power that guided the evolution of humanity from afar, and that the ultimate fate of all people and highest honor is to rejoin that power in death, becoming a small part of a much greater whole. They’re more right than most of their ranks know.
The Marker is in fact one of a great many objects like it, hurled to all corners of the universe by the Brethren Moons, a race of planetoid-sized creatures that devour whole civilizations to sustain themselves. The Markers are a key part of the Brethren Moons’ reproduction cycle: when a sufficiently technologically advanced race finds a Marker, it grants them the knowledge of how to create functioning replicas of itself and compels them to do so, both with subliminal commands and by producing unlimited energy ripe for the harnessing. Once a species is producing replica markers - either as objects of worship or fuel-less power plants - the original releases a signal that kicks off what’s known as a Convergence event, causing every Marker constructed in its image to begin resurrecting all dead tissue in the form of monsters known as Necromorphs, as well as driving sapient beings to paranoia and violence in order to create more dead tissue. When enough biomass has been gathered, the Markers launch all their gathered Necromorphs into orbit where they form into a ball that becomes a fledgling Brother Moon.
In terms of relevant current events, it’s easiest to start with the loss of the USG Ishimura, a planet-cracker class mining ship. In 2508, Concordance Extraction Corporation unknowingly brokered an illegal contract to mine out the planet Aegis VII which, unbeknownst to them, was home to a long-forgotten government outpost dedicated to experimenting on one of the first man-made Markers. When the Ishimura arrived, it was quickly overrun by refugee scientists and colonists suffering the effects of the prematurely triggered Marker. Within hours the entire city-sized mining ship was almost completely devoid of life. The small rescue force sent to investigate the garbled distress call fared little better, with Isaac Clarke as its only survivor after the mission proved unfeasible and the crew was overwhelmed by Necromorphs. Isaac was able to make it to one of the few remaining escape pods on the Ishimura, but not without coming in close contact with the Marker itself and receiving its ‘blessings’. Shortly thereafter, an EarthGov vessel was able to intercept Isaac’s escape pod.
With the population now wholly distrustful of planet cracking as an industry after the “mysterious” disappearance of the Ishimura, EarthGov was forced to rely even more heavily on the Markers as a source of fuel. Isaac was placed in stasis and shipped to the Titan Memorial Medical Center along with an unknown number of other scientists and engineers unfortunate enough to have encountered the Markers, where the government worked to extract information on the lost experiments from them. More Markers than ever before were constructed across all human settlements, until a group of Unitologist extremists began sabotaging the measures in place to prevent them from creating more Necromorphs and thus triggered the beginning phases of yet another Convergence.
These attacks continued for years, the twin forces of the advancing Necromorph hordes and Unitologist crusaders eventually toppling EarthGov entirely. A last-ditch mission was sent to a distant world thought to be the origin of the Markers in order to shut off the source of the signal and save humanity, but the planet was found to instead be the former home world of yet another of the Brethren Moons’ victims, with a young Brother Moon in its orbit. The team of scientists and engineers were able to activate a device the now-extinct alien civilization had left behind, pulling the Moon into the planet’s gravity well and effectively destroying it, but faced heavy losses in the process. In a cruel twist of fate, the dying Moon was able to send a distress call to the rest of its kind, and as of Isaac’s extraction Brethren Moons from across the whole universe are slowly beginning to converge on the Earth to avenge their kin and feast.
Real World:
Though Isaac was prepared enough for extraction - as by the end of the incident on Tau Volantis his “world” had begun to take on a nightmare-like unreality to him - he wasn’t quite ready for the living with the implications afterwards. While the physical side of his rehabilitation went well, finishing right on schedule, the metal and social sides ran into more than a few snags. Zion bears a striking resemblance to some of the more industrial cities of Isaac’s Matrix, and that coupled with his existing trust issues when it comes to being woken up in unfamiliar places by people claiming to want to help him lead to a significant period of denial and stubborn uncooperativeness. When he did finally come around he was able to throw himself wholeheartedly into work helping to maintain the life support systems beneath the city, but was quickly encouraged to find another or at least more outlets, as the familiar setting was only proving to cause him greater difficulty in disassociating himself from his former life.
He’s currently been out for two months, and is in slightly poorer shape than many of his redpill peers, with long periods of listlessness when not working making it difficult for him to care for himself.
ABILITIES AND SKILLS
Anomalies:
Isaac’s pretty much your bog-standard Earth human. Aside from Marker related stuff there isn’t much special he can do, and those things are very specific to his Matrix.
Skillset:
Isaac is a spaceship engineer. He is proficient with his world’s technology across the board, from fixing FTL-capable spaceship engines, to hacking into electronic security systems, to cobbling weapons together out of scrap (most notably a flashlight and some hospital equipment to produce a plasma cutter at the start of the second game). After surviving two separate Necromorph outbreaks, he’s also proved himself handy with ranged weaponry, mostly in the form of modified mining and/or welding equipment, but he’s made use of conventional guns (for his era) as well. In addition, he can be a capable pilot in a pinch, once navigating through a dense field of debris during atmospheric re-entry with failing engines.
Upload Capabilities:
SAMPLES
1:
Isaac’s not sure whether to pity or envy the people here from - who thought they were from more magical or primitive worlds. Other people in his batch of “redpills” he’s seen struggle with not having as many limbs as they were used to or missing senses they’d had their whole lives or living in a universe that operated on rules that were completely foreign to them. But Isaac? All he can see when he walks around Zion is some pre-planet cracking era mining colony turned underground city. The technology, the architecture, the people, none of them looked different enough to really convince him that this was a different world and not some elaborate trick.
The operative keeping an eye on him gives him a worried look as his grip on the railing goes from tight to white-knuckled painful, but Isaac doesn’t so much as spare him a sidelong glance, just staring down at the people bustling around the lower levels. What’s the more reasonable explanation? There’s no way he could’ve survived the fall from Tau Volantis’s upper atmosphere without some sort of help, or that a pair of EarthGov agents would turn up on a distant world in the middle of a losing fight with the Unitologists just to offer him a way out, or that anyone could dupe a whole city this size into some giant act for the sole purpose of fucking with him. But unlikelier things have happened to him before, and accepting that this is real means accepting that everything he suffered through - and everything he suffered for - was a lie.
“They’re dead,” says Isaac. The operative is surprised, understandably, as the two of them have been standing here for well over fifteen minutes now in dead silence after Isaac made it clear he wasn’t feeling up to smalltalk.
“Who?”
“Kyne, Hammond, Santos, the crew of the Ishimura, Titan Station, the entire population of the moon.” Isaac’s voice rises steadily in volume as he lists names until he’s shouting, and the last he punctuates by slamming his fist down on the metal railing he’d been leaning on. It rings like a gong and he’s going to be feeling the impact for days, but right now he couldn’t care any less. “Nicole. And why? If your machines are using us for batteries or processing power or - something, why kill anyone off early? Why engineer genocides when all it’s going to do is kill off their precious fucking livestock? Why couldn’t you do anything about it?”
He’s rounded on the other man now and they’re drawing a crowd. On some level Isaac’s aware that the operative isn’t likely to have any answers for him, but he’s angry and nothing he thought meant anything does anymore. All of the good things that happened to him were fake and all of the bad things happened for no reason other than some machine somewhere thought it would be neat. The operator opens his mouth again to respond, but Isaac’s in no mood for another canned response to a situation he’s been trained to deal with.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” he says, digging his fingers into his temples. “I just - shit.”
And with that, he turns on his heels and stalks away.
2:
What with everything that he’d been through in the past few years, Isaac had known this was going to happen for a long time. He’d been waiting for it - hell, he’d prayed for it a few times, in as much as a man whose primary relationship with churches is one of suspicion and fear can pray. If anything, going out like this is more than he could have ever hoped for. He’s doing something. Making a difference, like Buckell said.
Carver half drags him to the alien machine’s console, neither of them exactly on steady footing but Isaac’s legs seemingly the worst for wear out of the two of them.
“So this is it, huh? We use that Codex?” asks Carver, like this isn’t something they’d all gone over in their heads a thousand times since they found the damn thing. Isaac grunts.
“Yeah.”
“No more bullshit? We die here, now?”
Isaac has to turn his head to look at him - Carver’s on his left and his good eye’s all but swollen shut. It hurts but, hey, so does everything. He feels like he owes it to him, after all this. “But Earth gets a tomorrow,” he says, nodding. Carver doesn’t say anything else, just nods back and puts a hand on Isaac’s shoulder and Isaac allows himself one deep breath before placing his hands on the machine’s controls and twisting.
Everything explodes. The Tau Volantians hadn’t been nice enough to leave a manual lying around, so Isaac doesn’t know exactly how their device works, but something about it shuts off the powerful gravity field the Brother Moon had been using to tear up chunks of the planet, and without it all the floating debris - including the thing they’re standing on - goes into a chaotic free fall all at once. Isaac tries to hold on to something, but the ground twists and rolls under him and he’s too weak to cling for long, his last handhold slipping from his grip before momentum launches him, pinwheeling helplessly away.
His fingers find their way to the torn photograph of Ellie, still tucked away in one of his pockets. The freezing air whistles in his ears as he plummets, his RIG chattering at him to watch his body temperature. His descent is slower than it might be otherwise, caught between the gravity of a planet and Brother Moon’s as he is. Some distant part of him starts going through calculations; whether or not he’s going to hit the ground hard enough to die on impact or if he’s going to freeze to death broken on the rocks or be crushed slowly under the weight of a planetoid-sized Necromorph as it’s steadily pulled down to the surface as well. It’s inconclusive - he doesn’t have a way of measuring the forces acting on him or the distance left to the ground - but it doesn’t matter anyway. This is what he chose for himself. He’s not being torn apart by a Necromorph’s claws, or gunned down by fanatics, or rotting away in EarthGov custody. His body won’t be bent to the Brethren Moons’ will and his brain won’t be used to make more markers.
Isaac pulls the photograph from his pocket, so he can see her face one last time. It’s all over for him, but he’s not upset. If anything, he’s kind of at peace with it. Ellie is safe. No, Earth is safe. It’s all over. He’s done.
He closes his eyes, and he lets go.
OOC
Name: QV
Age: 19
Contact details:
Characters already in Systemwide: None!
BASIC PROFILE
Name: Isaac Clarke
Age: 46 biologically, 49 chronologically due to three years spent in stasis
Canon: Dead Space
Appearance: Here. Caucasian male, black hair flecked with gray, height is roughly 5'8", not muscular so much as stocky.
Extraction point: End of Dead Space 3, just before the Awakened DLC
OVERVIEW
Content Warnings for: Death, Mentions of Child Death, Cults, Involuntary Medical Testing, feel free to tell me if there’s any other important ones I should tag
Personality:
Isaac is a man with a relatively straightforward personality and motivations, all told. At his core he’s a quiet person who wants nothing more than a happy family and a peaceful life, and a great deal of his general outlook stems from the great many obstacles standing between him and this humble goal. His close personal relationships or lack thereof, the incidents aboard the USG Ishimura and what came after, and his resulting exposure to the alien artifacts known as the Markers are all things that have alternatingly shaped, tempered, and broken him immeasurably as a person.
While Isaac’s personal life isn’t touched on in very much detail in canon, what few facts we are given prove telling. In terms of relationships he appears to be a person of extremes, with devotion enough to follow those he trusts to the ends of the universe at one pole, guarded suspicion at the other, and very little in between. This trend appears to start with his parents: Isaac has spent his entire adult life estranged from his mother after she sold off the family estate and devoted the whole of her being to rising through the ranks of the Church of Unitology as a way of coping with her husband’s disappearance. This not only lead to their eventual falling out and estrangement, Isaac feeling abandoned and his mother disappointed in his lack of faith, but also left him with a lifelong distrust of the church. Isaac’s father, on the other hand, disappeared suddenly when while on a mission with the Merchant Marines when Isaac was four, as mentioned above. In contrast to the resentment Isaac still harbors for his mother, however, it’s strongly implied that at least some part of his decision to join Merchant Marines himself was motivated by the desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and potentially to find out what happened to him, as it’s noted that he’s made multiple unsuccessful inquiries into the mission during which he disappeared.
This trend of all or nothing continues with his other two notable relationships: Nicole Brennan, and Ellie Langford. Nicole dies prior to the beginning of the first game and as such we only see parts of her relationship with Isaac through flashbacks and the way he speaks to his hallucinations of her, but all evidence seems to point to them being very close. Isaac’s ability to relate to others is a bit healthier here - Nicole appears to be his only real friend, but he encourages her to strive for a prestigious position as a medical officer aboard the USG Ishimura while he’s posted elsewhere. When this promotion leads to her death, however, Isaac considers himself responsible, believing that if he’d kept her close he could have saved her. His grief over the loss of Nicole and fixation on her is made manifest in both the Marker-induced hallucination of her, taunting him for his failures, and more subtly in his actions, becoming one of his driving motivations and an unhealthy obsession throughout the series.
In fact, his later relationship with fellow Necromorph outbreak survivor Ellie Langford exemplifies just how much Nicole’s death affected him. Over the course of the events aboard Titan Station, Isaac becomes very attached to her very quickly. This isn’t too out of the ordinary, as it is a survival situation and their partnership is one of necessity at the start, but as the game goes on she is explicitly compared to Nicole more and more often, culminating in Isaac telling her“I couldn’t save Nicole, but I can save you.” before attempting to sacrifice himself to give her a chance at being rescued. They both survive the incident and later enter a romantic relationship, but Ellie eventually leaves him for his inability to move on and stop treating her as a second chance rather than her own person, as well as for having “given up on the world”. This does little to temper his fixation on her. He jumps at the first opportunity to follow which, again, isn’t too out of the ordinary given that he had been told she had gone missing while trying to find a way to stop any further Necromorph outbreaks, but while his devotion was understandable his motives were more than a bit skewed. His first reaction upon finding her alive after the relief wore off was berate her for entering another relationship so soon (with the captain of the rescue mission) despite more pressing issues like being on a spaceship filled with zombies, and when their ship crashed into the frozen wasteland of a planet after a Necromorph attack he displayed concern only for her, despite having been at least on friendly terms with the rest of the crew. He does begin to grow out of this as the game goes on, striking up something of a rapport with fellow engineer Jennifer Santos and rescue team member John Carver over the course of the mission, but his primary devotion and highest loyalty remain to Ellie until the end.
As for his experiences aboard the Ishimura and everything afterwards, likely the most striking of the lasting effects are his severe PTSD coupled with his Marker-induced madness. The PTSD is pretty self-explanatory, with Isaac having survived two separate Necromorph outbreaks by way of being forced to put down the twisted, reanimated corpses of men, women and children alike, witnessing the gruesome deaths of countless people - many of whom he knew personally - along the way. In addition to the general combat related triggers - gunfire, screaming, conditions that resemble those aboard the Ishimura or Titan station - being used repeatedly and against his will by Unitologist forces posing as allies and EarthGov itself alike has left him with an intense wariness of absolutely anybody claiming to try to help him, especially when it comes to anything having to do with the Markers. The madness, described as “dementia” by the game, is more along the lines of standard Hollywood-style dangerous insanity, with vivid hallucinations (often of lost loved ones), violent urges, and, most importantly, a nearly irresistible compulsion to build more Markers. Isaac’s psyche is impressively resilient, and he’s able to keep composed under most circumstances and recognize his hallucinations for what they are when he has them, which was rarely by the end of Dead Space 3, but certain situations can cause him to act before thinking, and he no longer feels safe unless armed.
In summary, Isaac Clarke is a largely passive person, preferring to react rather than take initiative. His actions are almost exclusively driven by his relationships with others, following those few he considers himself close to with undying loyalty and resisting everyone else with a powerful sort of obstinance. He is remarkably intelligent and resourceful, and at the start of the series was largely pleasant and mild-mannered, if a bit quiet, but his experiences over the course of the past several years have turned him much more suspicious and hostile, essentially putting him into a permanent “fight or flight” mentality.
Matrix:
Wiki Link (Note that the above content warnings all apply to this link in force. Note also that the events of Dead Space 3 vary slightly depending on whether it is played singleplayer or co-op. This iteration of Isaac assumes singleplayer.)
The year is 2514, and humanity is on the brink of collapse. The state of the human race is this: Earth has long since been stripped bare of resources - its oil reserves long gone, its ice caps melted, and all but the hardiest of species extinct. Centuries in the past, the governments of the world unified and took to the stars, founding colonies on other planets and moons to harvest their mineral wealth and sustain the still-growing demands of the population. This worked, for a time. The colonies rebelled once, overworked and mistreated by their motherland, but were quickly brought back into the fold by EarthGov's superior firepower. Mining and spacefaring technology advanced to the point where massive ships called planet-crackers could be commissioned and deployed to distant worlds, cutting them open and systematically rendering them down to their component parts to fuel civilization for another day.
Despite having the whole of the galaxy at their fingertips, however, humanity's growth continued to outstrip its ability to provide for itself. By the 26th century poverty and scarcity were once again rampant, with the majority of the population living in crowded slums and eating only carefully rationed supplies. Facing the grim future with little hope of help from the government, a growing number of people turned to one of mankind’s oldest comforts: religion.
The dominant religion in Dead Space’s modern day is Unitology - an organization only 200 years old but massive and influential enough that it rivals and even sometimes eclipses EarthGov in terms of political clout. Unitology is a faith centered around worship of an alien artifact discovered in the Chixulub crater in 2215. The central tenet of the Unitologist faith revolves around the idea that this artifact, known as the Marker, was a gift from a higher power that guided the evolution of humanity from afar, and that the ultimate fate of all people and highest honor is to rejoin that power in death, becoming a small part of a much greater whole. They’re more right than most of their ranks know.
The Marker is in fact one of a great many objects like it, hurled to all corners of the universe by the Brethren Moons, a race of planetoid-sized creatures that devour whole civilizations to sustain themselves. The Markers are a key part of the Brethren Moons’ reproduction cycle: when a sufficiently technologically advanced race finds a Marker, it grants them the knowledge of how to create functioning replicas of itself and compels them to do so, both with subliminal commands and by producing unlimited energy ripe for the harnessing. Once a species is producing replica markers - either as objects of worship or fuel-less power plants - the original releases a signal that kicks off what’s known as a Convergence event, causing every Marker constructed in its image to begin resurrecting all dead tissue in the form of monsters known as Necromorphs, as well as driving sapient beings to paranoia and violence in order to create more dead tissue. When enough biomass has been gathered, the Markers launch all their gathered Necromorphs into orbit where they form into a ball that becomes a fledgling Brother Moon.
In terms of relevant current events, it’s easiest to start with the loss of the USG Ishimura, a planet-cracker class mining ship. In 2508, Concordance Extraction Corporation unknowingly brokered an illegal contract to mine out the planet Aegis VII which, unbeknownst to them, was home to a long-forgotten government outpost dedicated to experimenting on one of the first man-made Markers. When the Ishimura arrived, it was quickly overrun by refugee scientists and colonists suffering the effects of the prematurely triggered Marker. Within hours the entire city-sized mining ship was almost completely devoid of life. The small rescue force sent to investigate the garbled distress call fared little better, with Isaac Clarke as its only survivor after the mission proved unfeasible and the crew was overwhelmed by Necromorphs. Isaac was able to make it to one of the few remaining escape pods on the Ishimura, but not without coming in close contact with the Marker itself and receiving its ‘blessings’. Shortly thereafter, an EarthGov vessel was able to intercept Isaac’s escape pod.
With the population now wholly distrustful of planet cracking as an industry after the “mysterious” disappearance of the Ishimura, EarthGov was forced to rely even more heavily on the Markers as a source of fuel. Isaac was placed in stasis and shipped to the Titan Memorial Medical Center along with an unknown number of other scientists and engineers unfortunate enough to have encountered the Markers, where the government worked to extract information on the lost experiments from them. More Markers than ever before were constructed across all human settlements, until a group of Unitologist extremists began sabotaging the measures in place to prevent them from creating more Necromorphs and thus triggered the beginning phases of yet another Convergence.
These attacks continued for years, the twin forces of the advancing Necromorph hordes and Unitologist crusaders eventually toppling EarthGov entirely. A last-ditch mission was sent to a distant world thought to be the origin of the Markers in order to shut off the source of the signal and save humanity, but the planet was found to instead be the former home world of yet another of the Brethren Moons’ victims, with a young Brother Moon in its orbit. The team of scientists and engineers were able to activate a device the now-extinct alien civilization had left behind, pulling the Moon into the planet’s gravity well and effectively destroying it, but faced heavy losses in the process. In a cruel twist of fate, the dying Moon was able to send a distress call to the rest of its kind, and as of Isaac’s extraction Brethren Moons from across the whole universe are slowly beginning to converge on the Earth to avenge their kin and feast.
Real World:
Though Isaac was prepared enough for extraction - as by the end of the incident on Tau Volantis his “world” had begun to take on a nightmare-like unreality to him - he wasn’t quite ready for the living with the implications afterwards. While the physical side of his rehabilitation went well, finishing right on schedule, the metal and social sides ran into more than a few snags. Zion bears a striking resemblance to some of the more industrial cities of Isaac’s Matrix, and that coupled with his existing trust issues when it comes to being woken up in unfamiliar places by people claiming to want to help him lead to a significant period of denial and stubborn uncooperativeness. When he did finally come around he was able to throw himself wholeheartedly into work helping to maintain the life support systems beneath the city, but was quickly encouraged to find another or at least more outlets, as the familiar setting was only proving to cause him greater difficulty in disassociating himself from his former life.
He’s currently been out for two months, and is in slightly poorer shape than many of his redpill peers, with long periods of listlessness when not working making it difficult for him to care for himself.
ABILITIES AND SKILLS
Anomalies:
Isaac’s pretty much your bog-standard Earth human. Aside from Marker related stuff there isn’t much special he can do, and those things are very specific to his Matrix.
Skillset:
Isaac is a spaceship engineer. He is proficient with his world’s technology across the board, from fixing FTL-capable spaceship engines, to hacking into electronic security systems, to cobbling weapons together out of scrap (most notably a flashlight and some hospital equipment to produce a plasma cutter at the start of the second game). After surviving two separate Necromorph outbreaks, he’s also proved himself handy with ranged weaponry, mostly in the form of modified mining and/or welding equipment, but he’s made use of conventional guns (for his era) as well. In addition, he can be a capable pilot in a pinch, once navigating through a dense field of debris during atmospheric re-entry with failing engines.
Upload Capabilities:
Anomalous Skills: 0
Martial Arts: 0
Projectile Weaponry: 2
Technical Skills: 7
Wild Card: 1
Martial Arts: 0
Projectile Weaponry: 2
Technical Skills: 7
Wild Card: 1
SAMPLES
1:
Isaac’s not sure whether to pity or envy the people here from - who thought they were from more magical or primitive worlds. Other people in his batch of “redpills” he’s seen struggle with not having as many limbs as they were used to or missing senses they’d had their whole lives or living in a universe that operated on rules that were completely foreign to them. But Isaac? All he can see when he walks around Zion is some pre-planet cracking era mining colony turned underground city. The technology, the architecture, the people, none of them looked different enough to really convince him that this was a different world and not some elaborate trick.
The operative keeping an eye on him gives him a worried look as his grip on the railing goes from tight to white-knuckled painful, but Isaac doesn’t so much as spare him a sidelong glance, just staring down at the people bustling around the lower levels. What’s the more reasonable explanation? There’s no way he could’ve survived the fall from Tau Volantis’s upper atmosphere without some sort of help, or that a pair of EarthGov agents would turn up on a distant world in the middle of a losing fight with the Unitologists just to offer him a way out, or that anyone could dupe a whole city this size into some giant act for the sole purpose of fucking with him. But unlikelier things have happened to him before, and accepting that this is real means accepting that everything he suffered through - and everything he suffered for - was a lie.
“They’re dead,” says Isaac. The operative is surprised, understandably, as the two of them have been standing here for well over fifteen minutes now in dead silence after Isaac made it clear he wasn’t feeling up to smalltalk.
“Who?”
“Kyne, Hammond, Santos, the crew of the Ishimura, Titan Station, the entire population of the moon.” Isaac’s voice rises steadily in volume as he lists names until he’s shouting, and the last he punctuates by slamming his fist down on the metal railing he’d been leaning on. It rings like a gong and he’s going to be feeling the impact for days, but right now he couldn’t care any less. “Nicole. And why? If your machines are using us for batteries or processing power or - something, why kill anyone off early? Why engineer genocides when all it’s going to do is kill off their precious fucking livestock? Why couldn’t you do anything about it?”
He’s rounded on the other man now and they’re drawing a crowd. On some level Isaac’s aware that the operative isn’t likely to have any answers for him, but he’s angry and nothing he thought meant anything does anymore. All of the good things that happened to him were fake and all of the bad things happened for no reason other than some machine somewhere thought it would be neat. The operator opens his mouth again to respond, but Isaac’s in no mood for another canned response to a situation he’s been trained to deal with.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” he says, digging his fingers into his temples. “I just - shit.”
And with that, he turns on his heels and stalks away.
2:
What with everything that he’d been through in the past few years, Isaac had known this was going to happen for a long time. He’d been waiting for it - hell, he’d prayed for it a few times, in as much as a man whose primary relationship with churches is one of suspicion and fear can pray. If anything, going out like this is more than he could have ever hoped for. He’s doing something. Making a difference, like Buckell said.
Carver half drags him to the alien machine’s console, neither of them exactly on steady footing but Isaac’s legs seemingly the worst for wear out of the two of them.
“So this is it, huh? We use that Codex?” asks Carver, like this isn’t something they’d all gone over in their heads a thousand times since they found the damn thing. Isaac grunts.
“Yeah.”
“No more bullshit? We die here, now?”
Isaac has to turn his head to look at him - Carver’s on his left and his good eye’s all but swollen shut. It hurts but, hey, so does everything. He feels like he owes it to him, after all this. “But Earth gets a tomorrow,” he says, nodding. Carver doesn’t say anything else, just nods back and puts a hand on Isaac’s shoulder and Isaac allows himself one deep breath before placing his hands on the machine’s controls and twisting.
Everything explodes. The Tau Volantians hadn’t been nice enough to leave a manual lying around, so Isaac doesn’t know exactly how their device works, but something about it shuts off the powerful gravity field the Brother Moon had been using to tear up chunks of the planet, and without it all the floating debris - including the thing they’re standing on - goes into a chaotic free fall all at once. Isaac tries to hold on to something, but the ground twists and rolls under him and he’s too weak to cling for long, his last handhold slipping from his grip before momentum launches him, pinwheeling helplessly away.
His fingers find their way to the torn photograph of Ellie, still tucked away in one of his pockets. The freezing air whistles in his ears as he plummets, his RIG chattering at him to watch his body temperature. His descent is slower than it might be otherwise, caught between the gravity of a planet and Brother Moon’s as he is. Some distant part of him starts going through calculations; whether or not he’s going to hit the ground hard enough to die on impact or if he’s going to freeze to death broken on the rocks or be crushed slowly under the weight of a planetoid-sized Necromorph as it’s steadily pulled down to the surface as well. It’s inconclusive - he doesn’t have a way of measuring the forces acting on him or the distance left to the ground - but it doesn’t matter anyway. This is what he chose for himself. He’s not being torn apart by a Necromorph’s claws, or gunned down by fanatics, or rotting away in EarthGov custody. His body won’t be bent to the Brethren Moons’ will and his brain won’t be used to make more markers.
Isaac pulls the photograph from his pocket, so he can see her face one last time. It’s all over for him, but he’s not upset. If anything, he’s kind of at peace with it. Ellie is safe. No, Earth is safe. It’s all over. He’s done.
He closes his eyes, and he lets go.