badou nails ♈ application

[badbreak]

OOC:
Name: Rabid
Are you over 16?: Yep
Personal DW: mangemouth @ dw / oopsipuked @ lj
Timezone: EST
Other contact: mangemad @ plork
Characters already in the game: Katsura Kotarou / itsnotzura
How did you find us?: I am having an illicit relationship with both of the mods at the same time


IC:
Character name: Badou Nails
Fandom: DOGS/DOGS; Bullets & Carnage
Timeline: Pre-series. BEFORE (SPOILERS) DAVE DIES (SPOILERS) FROM BEING AN IRRESPONSIBLE FUCKHEAD. Essentially, in the same era of the flashbacks in the Badou one-shot.

Age: A very foul-mouthed 14.

~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: In a world where genetic modification is prevalent enough that Badou wouldn’t double-glance at a pigheaded humanoid, Badou himself is totally without modification. Genetically, he’s 100% human, but living in the Underground produces a relatively tough kind of human. As far as skills and strengths go, Badou has the unbelievable ability to piss off anyone, anytime, anywhere. This results from his skill of being far too fucking clever for his age, the ‘realistic’ half of the Nails duo; his sense of self-preservation is likely the only thing that keeps him alive in many situations that either his attitude (or his brother’s nosiness) has gotten him into. Like Dave, Badou is brains rather than brawn, amazing survival instincts, and really, really good sprinting abilities. Despite being made of bones and shitty willpower, Badou is a relatively okay scrapper just by way of living in the fucked-up, underground urban environment that DOGS is set in. As Badou was brought up by and idolizes his brother, his skill set is similar to Dave’s, but always tempered with a kind of negativism – whereas Dave’s charisma strength lies in his being easygoing and casual, Badou’s charisma is linked more to a kind of frenetic energy, which makes people stop and stare.

In series, Badou’s strength lies in being a bloodthirsty berserker-for-hire, a very real side of him that emerges when he hasn’t smoked enough to subdue it. Without smoke (cigarette or gunsmoke), Badou is prone to wildly laughing homicidal rampages, throwing his usually close-guarded self preservation to the wind – and he doesn’t stop until he’s gotten another smoke fix, or until someone has beaten him into an unconscious pulp. Pre-series, however, he hasn’t had the mental trauma of watching his brother die and living on the (very dangerous) streets of the Underground to serve as a catalyst for this mental instability. That is not to say that, without Dave’s death, Badou does not have psychological problems underlying the lolworthy puberty rage. If Badou were pushed, signs of these as of yet latent ‘strengths’ – disregard of human life, lack of self-preservation, manic persistence in violence, severe addiction problems, and all around bad humour – would begin to display.

How would they use their abilities?: To fuck shit up.

Appearance: Like his brother, Badou has a messy head of shocking orange-red hair, perpetually scruffy. Badou’s hair is longer than Dave’s, grown out to just above his shoulders, and his eyes (both intact, at this point in time!) are the same shade of green as his brother’s. Living underground, Dave and Badou aren’t exactly tan – they are extremely pale, with the odd smattering of dusty freckles.

As for build, from the start, Badou is a lanky motherfucker – where Dave is broader and stockier, Badou is all angles and bones, thin and tall for his age, already clocking in at 5’6. Where Jess has Dave’s height capping at around 5’11, Badou’s final height is around 6’1, and this junkyard bone awkwardness would be at its fucking peak at the tender age of 14 and shitty. Where Dave’s body strength is centered more in his chest and core, Badou’s is outsourced into wiry arms and legs.

Neither male is exactly healthy looking, as they subsist on (Badou’s homemade) diet of whatever the fuck was around/whatever the fuck they could afford. Nevertheless, there’s a certain brittle quality about Badou that speaks to a cockroach, survivalist disposition. Badou is probably often bruised, bandaged, and bleeding, kicking around like the punkass he is in shitty jeans and t-shirt.

Background/Personality:
DOGS/DOGS; B&C focus on the stories of 4 main protagonists, unkillable zombie Heine, PI Badou, swordswoman Naoto, and old gun Mihai, coming together against a backdrop of genetic modification and rampant family fuckery. Since this younger version of Badou has not yet grown up into the 21-year old suicide junkie, nor met Heine, Naoto, or Mihai, to go on and have further wacky adventures, I’m not going to focus too much on the plot of main story, since it doesn’t have much to do with what I would actually be playing, which centers around the flashbacks/the one-shot/Dave/Badou’s growth of character in response to Dave, and the main themes of family, violence, and life in the Underground.

The DOGS world, as I’ve already brushed on, is a rough place to live. Set in some arbitrarily European dystopian future, Badou lives underground in what can be compared to Gotham City on genetic modification. Violence, prostitution, crime, corruption in the government, and fucking around with your DNA is common. While Badou is one of the main characters in the series, out of the main four protagonists we have the least information about his pre-series past. These tidbits about his past tend to come in the form of Badou’s own, subjective comments, or private flashbacks that (usually) involve Dave and the one-shot Miwa did of Badou having a bad day and reminiscing. Badou is generally not very forthcoming about his past largely because of Dave – while he eventually claims to Heine and Naoto he once had a brother, it’s only after a policeman has already mentioned him. Likewise, in the flashbacks, the focus is always on Dave’s dialogue, Dave’s dreams, and Dave’s influence on Badou. It’s through this that we come to understand how Badou’s character and Dave’s character both directly correlate and starkly contrast one another, Dave’s influence (or non-influence) having constant cause-and-effect changes on a young Badou.

Pre-series, it is shown that Badou and Dave lived together in one of the city’s many squalid flats. No parents or other siblings are ever mentioned in the Nails family, and one way or another, it is left up to Dave to raise his younger brother, Badou. The panels which show their living together tend to have only the bare essentials – a couch to sleep on, a table to eat on, etc etc. In the one-shot flashback, Dave is bitching about money, making their below-average income state even more apparent (the cost of cigarettes is too high, much less the cost of living). And it’s no wonder – the brothers live off the erratic paychecks of Dave, a self-proclaimed private investigator and freelance journalist. Dave worked digging up dirt and causing riots and scandals in the news, doing jobs at irregular hours and making enemies in low places. Badou makes offhand mention in the series that he’d tagged along and actively helped on some of his brother’s jobs; giving him both a taste for digging up info and the adrenaline-high style of that “hardboiled life.” Dave’s last job – that of investigating the genetic modification going on in the Below, it’s ties to those High Up – is what eventually draws Badou’s story into the main series’ web of characters. Dave’s murder is a catalyst for Badou, more negative from the start, to jump into the “bullets and carnage” that is Heine and Naoto’s path downwards.

Badou’s personality, pre-series and current, is in many ways a dark mirror to Dave’s, emulation as much as it is opposite response. Where Dave is an idealist, chasing bad guys and splashing ink for social justice, Badou is left to face the reality of trying to keep their electricity from being cut off. Badou mentions that he knows how to sew because his brother never learned any domestic skills – it was Badou that had to fix Dave’s shot-up clothes, fix their meals, and keep his feet planted firmly on the ground, while Dave pursued his goals. Where Dave sees a broken city and wants to expose the wound to air it, Badou grows up eventually concluding that everyone in the city is “just scum,” actually contributing to the violence rather than trying to stop it; Heine and Badou are sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys, but always crazy, violent guys. This is a sharp contrast to Dave, who seems to be in possession of all his marbles, and to have been more inclined to flight than fight. In Badou’s flashbacks, Dave uses trickery and evasion to escape with his info, to go on to create something with it. Badou, on the other hand, almost always has to resort to physical violence to solve problems, and he usually destroys his own hard work in the process of racking up the body count. Despite these basic ideological differences, Badou idolizes Dave utterly up until his death, constantly tailing him on mooching expeditions, jobs, anywhere that Dave would allow Badou to go (and some places he didn’t).In flashbacks, he is (uncharacteristically for his current-day character) attentively listening to everything the older Nails says, although whether he adheres to the gospel of Dave is another story entirely – which is unfortunate, given that Dave’s parenting style is essentially already a “do what I say, not what I do” endeavor. Badou’s emulation of Dave probably also leads back to wanting to be a part of that carefree, “hardboiled” way of life that Dave so seemed to enjoy; after all, dreaming Dave sees life as “one big party, and if you're gonna blow it, it should go out in one big bang.” Badou’s party is the realistic version of this romantic sentiment, and judging from the eventual wake of corpses, it’s a party that got out of control. Dave’s going out in a “big bang,” grinning at recently disfigured Badou as he falls to his death into darkness, is not a glamorous, triumphant end. "What if you die in one big party?" Badou is left alone to ask.

All of these flashbacks focus on Dave and Badou’s growth in response, so Badou’s pre-series life outside of his brother entails a lot of headcanon and meta extrapolation. We get some information from Badou's run-ins with Daniella, a woman who has become cracked by the Underground, and because of her dementia, sometimes confuses Badou for the long-gone Dave. She implies that Badou, despite being glued to Dave's side, was always "grumbling under his breath" when they came in together. After praising Badou for being mature for his age, Daniella requests that 'Dave' not mention it to Badou, as he'll "turn bright red and get mad." As a shitty 14 year old, Badou always appears in panels to be just that – mad, scowling, lazy, skeptical, and listening to his pipe-dreaming older brother rant romantically about destitution and death. As a realist, he’s constantly wound up, and his releases often result in loud outbursts and acerbic, spastic behavior. Having grown up in an unsafe environment with an unreliable guardian, Badou is slow to give a shit and even slower to trust – but it isn’t impossible, and his curiosity can easily get the better of him in many situations (almost as easily as his temper). Strangers pose both threat and intrigue, and his interactions with those of his own age (and even older) tend to be rough and antagonistic. He is the kind of kid that doesn’t have many (any) friends, yet everyone knows his name. Badou tends to expect the worst – so he makes his best efforts to beat the worst there.

Pre-series Badou has not yet has found the stress outlets of violence, addiction, and slap-bang camaraderie, and so spends much of his time worrying and snapping snark at others. Dave has engendered him with a kind of attitude which leads him to constantly question and interrogate his surroundings, which makes him as intelligent and quick on the uptake as it can make him rude and insufferable. As shown with Dave, he can be painstakingly loyal and put great weight on himself for the sake of those he’s pitched his banner behind, even to his own detriment – while impatient about stupid shit, he’d wait for days for Dave to come home from a job ("Are you okay, bro?"). As he expects nothing from the world around him (or even his own kin), he has a severe lack of entitlement, his temper usually flaring purely out of exasperation for exasperation’s sake, a stressed-out 14 year old’s explosiveness ("What the hell is this?!"). He does have a sense of humour under all that tsun tsun, but whether or not it’s fit for public consumption (read; non-Nails) is another thing entirely. He will have a tendency to tease and pick on both those he dislikes and those he feels affection for, as that is also how he’s been raised – as a “Bad Boy.”

Why should that character be in this game: N/A.

Why do you want to continue their history here: N/A.

For applicants considering an alternate version of a character already in game, please use this as your chance to explain the key differences between your character and the one already in play: N/A.

Have you read up on how the game works?: The guide uses the FlamingFerret, you can make money by taking missions, stealing, and mooching.

1st person sample:

[ VIDEO ]
[a shock of long, scraggly orange hair greets the viewer, covering the face of a pale, gangly boy]

[from beneath the hair, a constant barrage of curses assaults the audio feed, while something leafy, spiky, and green curls and coils around the frame]

[a cheerful, bubbly, clearly inhuman voice trills out]

Say your name, dear! You wwwon’t find your friends if you don’t say wwwho you are!

Fuckoff! Fuckoff fuckoffa me! Creepy shitty fuckin’ -- let go!

Are there any refugees aboard who have lost a Fuckoff? – Poppet, you must stay still! How can anyone get a proper look at you if you’re flagellating?

Flagellating?! GET OFF’A ME, GOD DAMNIT -- !

Oh, fine, then. Wwwiggle and wwwrithe as you wwwish. As I was saying, this Fuckoff has a lavender spot on its right ocular cavity, several burgundy petals, somewwwhat undernourished stalks, wwwhite tendrils, and wwwonderful aubergine foliage! Is there anything you wwwish to add, dear?

FUCK OFF!

Yes, yes, I’ve said it’s you! If anyone wwwishes to reclaim their Fuckoff, I believe it’s quite impatient to be wwwith it’s own kind!

3rd person sample:
Badou is reeling from the lights.

Well, to be fair, he is reeling from a lot of things – like the existence of aliens, for big fuckin’ one, and his sudden abduction by the very same for another. The clamour of panicked voices around sets his teeth on edge, and the panic seeping from the crowd soaks into his ruddy sneakers (coating old layers of fearthrillanxiety). The boy takes off from the Arrivals area as quickly as his long legs can take him, seeking elsewhere (anywhere but here, anywhere but in this push of unfamiliarunhappy bodies).

But the lights, the damn lights – they’re brighter than anything he can ever remember experiencing, in a run-down faded flat, with electricity bills that just don’t pay themselves. They burn like he thinks the sun might burn, when there were seasons. Or maybe they’re more like the stars that blinked out before he was born, high and numerous and impossible. He takes a corner sharply, and it’s in front of a porthole that panic-slicked trainers skid, as he gets his first glimpse of supernova space written large. Bright green eyes slip reflexively off the unbelievable, bright specks (sinkingseeking that huge darkness instead). He loses himself in it long enough for legs to tangle, for panic to overtake rubber.

Like a gangly foal (like a gangly fool), he trips face-first into a gaping maw of teeth and coiling vines.

Questions?: How many bears can bear bear if a bear must bear a bear?

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