application for eastbound

[in_theworks]

PLAYER NAME: Alishia
CONTACT: knightinqs | knightinqs#1243
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: I'm on the TDM, but Emily originally pushed me in this direction!

CHARACTER: Wrench (Reginald Blechman)
CANON: WATCH_DOGS
CANON POINT: Post-WATCH_DOGS 2

BACKGROUND:

• Born Reginald Blechman, it's strongly implied that Wrench had a traumatic childhood, likely centered around bullying or abuse he had to suffer thanks to the port wine stain birthmark over his left eye.

• Built and took to wearing his trademark mask at some point, to hide that fact, and created the Wrench persona to help cope with his trauma and social anxiety.

• Taught himself how to hack and started using his powers for laughs, attacking high profile targets only to leave dick jokes in his wake.

• Eventually caught wind of the hacktivist group, DedSec, and just started showing up at their hackerspaces to build robots, write code and kick ass and take names. While he was initially thought to be an FBI plant, DedSec's higher ups soon realized that he was genuinely on their side and began to trust him. Before too long, he was a part of the inner circle, along with Sitara Dhawan, Horatio Carlin, and Josh Sauchak. Together, they fought crime! Or at least start formulating a plan to stick it to the man, the shady mega-cooperation, Blume.

• About the time the plan was coming together, they recruited another hacker, Retr0 aka Marcus Holloway, who, over time, became the group's unofficial leader and one of Wrench's closest friends. For awhile, everything seemed to be coming up DedSec, as they all worked together to support Marcus and gather resources to take down Blume. Unfortunately, it turned out that Blume's CTO, Dusan Nemec, had been watching DedSec and manipulating things to make it look like they were honestly making progress, before pulling the rug out from under them.

• Defeated, DedSec's members took some time to themselves, only to come back together at Marcus's request, to go to Swelter Skelter, a Burning Man-esque event, out in the desert, geared towards hackers and tech-types. There, the group meet Ray Kenney, a former Blume employee-turned-whistleblower with a grudge. He talks his way into DedSec, bringing fresh resources and perspective to the table, and invigorated, DedSec returns home, back on Blume's trail.

• Everything does not go as smoothly this time. Horatio is kidnapped by one of the local street gangs and killed when he refuses to do work for them. Wrench, meanwhile, is arrested by the FBI and interrogated by them and Dusan, before ultimately being rescued by Marcus, solidifying their relationship.

• DedSec prevails in the end, however, gathering enough information to take down Dusan, if not all of Blume. Wrench plays his part in the conclusion by hitting a Blume data farm -- literally. He breaks in with several guns, grenades and a rocket launcher, and proceeds to nuke the place. The game ends with the group partying and making plans to carry on with their mission, to stand against the rest of Blume and its cooperate bullshit.

• Why there is no wiki for this, beyond a whole two paragraphs, I have no idea, but there you go.

ABILITIES | POWERS: Wrench has no supernatural abilities to speak of, his world basically an analogue for ours. He does, however, have several skills that he's picked up over the course of his career as anarchist and hacktivist, for better or worse, as detailed below.

• Combat Skills: Despite being, well, a beanpole of a kid, Wrench is decent in a fight, favoring heavy melee weapons, like a sledgehammer or crowbar, to give himself some weight. He's a decent shot with a gun, though he prefers the spray and pray method to any sense of dedicated marksmanship, and has been known to carry around flashbang grenades to disorient his enemies. Basically, he's as wild in a fight as he is in everything else he does.
• Demolitions Expert: According to one of his teammates, while Wrench is "good at coding, he's better at breaking things apart" and that much is very true. Not only is Wrench capable of putting together explosives from a bare minimum of supplies, he's also smart enough to be able to do the math to know where to put them for greatest effect. Greatest effect doesn't always mean wanton destruction or bringing down a building without damaging anything else, either -- he once used his know-how to rig up a firework show as a distraction and calling card both, the fireworks coming together to form DedSec's logo. He's just really good with things that go boom, period.
• Genius-level Intellect: For all that he passes himself off as loud, crass and destructive, Wrench is an extremely intelligent man behind the act. He taught himself to hack and build effectively. He memorized the technical manuals for some hospital equipment to better help Marcus with a mission he was on. He's a quick study, if what he's studying is something he's interested in -- really, his apparent ADHD is probably the biggest obstacle to his intelligence -- and that has and probably will continue to serve him in the future.
• Engineering: Wrench, like Tony Stark, can build just about anything in a cave with a box of scraps. His area of expertise, beyond making explosives, however, seems to lie in robotics. He retrofitted a Haum security robot to serve his purposes and, later in his canon, will be responsible for designing the combat robots used by Thomas Rempart to police London. He built the mask he wears. He's also responsible for building and maintaining DedSec's 3D printer and producing most of the plans for it -- even if about half of those plans are a little ridiculous, albeit functional, in nature. You know you want a unicorn dildo gun.
• Freerunning: Wrench is fairly athletic and adept at parkour and freerunning. Really, what else is there to say?
• Hacking: Like the rest of his teammates, Wrench is adept at writing malicious code, malware and the like. He also knows how to exploit ctOS, the City Operating System created by Blume that manages San Francisco's infrastructure, and turn it to his advantage -- his personal ctOS profile, back home, had been defaced to read things like your future boyfriend and fuck you and fuck your mother rather than kicking back any relevant information on him personally, if and when law enforcement should go looking, for example. More practically, he can also use his hacking skills to access anything on a network -- CCTV cameras, traffic lights, bank accounts -- but that likely won't be entirely relevant here.

PERSONALITY:
"I CAME, I SAW, I BLEW SHIT UP, I CAME AGAIN!"

At first glance, exactly what you'd expect from someone whose entire aesthetic seems to rely on leather and spikes -- he's loud and crass, with a fuck you attitude where authority is concerned. Where this started out as a simple persona, designed as a sort of smokescreen to cover his insecurities by being their opposite, he's been acting out like that so long that it's become a genuine part of his personality. Thankfully, despite coming across as a walking dick joke, at worst, or nothing more than the group's muscle, at best, there's more to him that just the persona.

"BARBARIANS ARE AT THE GATE, READY TO BUST SOME ROMAN HEADS!"

Wrench has heart, beyond the anarchist front he puts up, genuinely concerned with the fate of little guy -- he wouldn't have stuck around with DedSec as long as he has, if he didn't. That's the good news. The bad news is that, if left to his own devices, his means tend to get a little questionable, sometimes. This is the man that, on a good day, suggested making up a bunch of lies about his world's Scientology analogue, in order to sway people away from them, and on a bad, brought a rocket launcher to a knife fight, when he had to break into a Blume facility on his own. Anything so no one has to go through the same shit he did, growing up, being taken advantage of, bullied and looked down on. Fortunately, in most cases, it's not really hard to talk him out of those violent solutions with a little logic. In the former case, for example, all it took was reminding him that spreading lies would reflect badly on anything DedSec did in the future, if and when it got out that they were liars.

He can see the value of foresight and tactics, even if they're not the first thing he reaches for as a kneejerk reaction.

"YOU KNOW THAT SHIT DUSAN SAID? I WOULD NEVER TURN ON YOU."

Once his loyalty is won, Wrench is unfaltering. He's never had many people in his life willing to tolerate being around him, let alone call themselves his friend, so it's no surprise that he desperately clings to the friendships he has made with reckless abandon. Literally nothing would cause him to turn on the people he genuinely cares about -- not even very real threats to his freedom or his sense of self, as was the case when he was detained by the FBI and Blume. If it's down to a friend or himself, he'll put himself between them and whatever else every single time.

"ALRIGHT, SO. ARE WE GOING TO WAR FOR THIS?"

Speaking of his loyalty and his penchant for violent solutions, it probably should be noted that Wrench has an explosive temper. His reaction to an early defeat from Blume was to throw a chair around the hackerspace until someone told him to sit down and shut up, after all. Thankfully, his temper also seems to be short-lived, for the most part, if the fact that, after a heated argument with one of his teammates, they seem to be back on speaking terms after a relatively short time. There are exceptions to this rule, however -- he's not stupid enough to forgive and forget, when someone has repeatedly wronged him, and boy, can he hold a grudge, but the everyday annoyances are expressed hotly and then forgotten about in a matter of minutes.

"I CAN'T TELL IF SHE THINKS MY MASK IS HOT OR CREEPY."

Despite everything he does excluding confidence and Getting Shit Done energy, Wrench is a kid and a shy kid, at heart. The few time he's been without his mask to hide behind or had to be genuine about something, it's been awkwardly and with a healthy dose of fear. He's afraid that, if and when people actually see him for who he really is, particularly where his physical appearance is concerned, they'll be turned off and and turn on him. DedSec and Marcus in particular has helped him to realize that he can have a support system, a family, that not everyone is as terrible as the people he grew up with, but there's still that lingering nervousness when it comes to outsiders. It will take some time before he stops being Wrench and lets himself be Reggie around anyone new, that in mind.

OTHER

ENTP (The Debater), Slytherin, Aries, Earth Dragon, Sanguine Temperament, Chaotic Good, Canonically Bisexual

SAMPLE: Here and here.

INVENTORY:

• An LED mask that he wears at all times to hide his birthmark and baffle facial recognition software.
• His cellphone which, while pretty useless in the setting as is, contains DedSec's hacking toolkit. Given the right circumstances and tech level, he can use it to control an area's infrastructure from taking control of cameras to remotely detonating any bombs he's made.

NOTES: N/A

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-heavy, if it's plausible!