Expiation app

[despitethenora]

Player: Jay
Contact: fake.alchemist@gmail.com, or plurk
Age: over 30
Current Characters: N/A

Character Name: Aloy
Character Canon: Horizon: Forbidden West
Canon Point: End of Forbidden West, prior to Burning Shores.
Age: 20

Crime: Identity theft

Background: Wiki!

Personality: The Horizon series revels in highlighting how environment shapes a person, and you can see it all through Aloy. Aloy is the clone of an ancient scientist, literally created to save the world when something derailed the system restoring Earth from a robot apocalypse. She grew up shunned and isolated by her people’s beliefs, with a tool that let her see the hidden truths of her world, and is now struggling with the mounting pressure of her obligations. When people stopped shunning her, she isolated herself because it was attention she couldn’t accept. Now her latest narrative arc is her starting to learn to let in friends and her new sister. By the end of Forbidden West, she’s built a close team, and it’s time for her to start getting used to what that means. These are the components of a clone under pressure:

• Competitive pride: Growing up, the only path Aloy had to acceptance from her people or to learn about her own background was to become the best hunter, win her people’s right of passage and with it the right to demand the answers she wanted. Aloy had to be the best, and it turns out she enjoys the thrill of a competition. She enjoys friendly rivalries, chooses thrilling but unwise paths, and sidetracks from the plot to take on hunting ground challenges, robot horse racing, or board game competitions.
• Stubborn confidence: You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Aloy is quite certain of herself. Her life didn’t allow for uncertainty or not being good enough - the only way forward was to ignore obstacles and do it anyway. This shaped a tendency toward all-in strategies and wrecking ball style problem solving. It becomes a weakness as she pushes herself to carry on instead of resting and recovering. It also challenges her relationships - she gets too wrapped up in what she’s decided to do to properly consider the needs and desires of those around her, and she actively chafes at her clone sister’s anxiety instead of understanding why Beta can’t display the same will Aloy does.
• Sarcasm and skepticism: Aloy has a massive chip on her shoulder about religion and supernatural ideas. Everything she’s done is in spite of her people’s religion, and she expresses a kneejerk skepticism as a result. We see her frustration when she tries to prove her perspective and it gets reframed to affirm the other’s beliefs. Aloy frequently turns to rolling her eyes at a priest, and snarking at the odd conclusions and behaviors others exhibit. Aloy is also scathing about people screwing others over for wealth or glorification of war.
• Moral obligation: Suffering a bad case of Main Character Syndrome, Aloy can be a bit self-centered. She helps others whenever she can, but often out of a clear sense of obligation. At first, a quest to save the world really only matters because it solves the mystery of who her absent mother is; she’ll save you from a robot dinosaur, but she’ll sass you for getting in trouble in the first place. Her sense of obligation has grown to actually being pressed to save the world, but she hates when people start calling her a savior; Aloy prefers friendly rivals rehashing thrilling parts of a competition over accolades for a hero. She actively sneaks away when her allies try to organize a celebration for saving the world.
• Compassionate: All that said, Aloy can be very caring. Yes, as Our Lady of Perpetual Moral Obligation, she’s complaining about helping people that don’t even appreciate her in the way that she wants - but she WILL go out of her way to hunt extra food and track down lost items for a woman who would shun her, and sounds apologetic when she explains that she doesn’t know when she’ll be available to help again. Aloy’s invested in the wellbeing of families she sees, empathizes with an AI’s loneliness, offers affectionate gestures to machines that she “tames,” and dwells on the tragedies and stories of the lives of long-dead people. Aloy will make things harder for herself because she’s decided it’s the right thing to do, and because she wants to live up to something her mother once said - that her daughter should be someone who can heal the world, even a little bit.
• Spirit of discovery: Aloy delights in finding and making new things. Exploring old ruins is an interesting puzzle, and warning her away from one because it’s either against the rules or dangerous just tends to make it more interesting. Aloy also enjoys the inspiration of getting inventive within the framework of her understanding of the world. Her games also invariably involve some fixation on collecting the inscrutable artifacts of ancient civilizations (where by inscrutable artifacts, we mean novelty coffee mugs and dinosaur toys).


Abilities: Aloy is an excellent survivalist, hunter, athlete, and scavenger - but she is meant to be a normal human whose advantages are purely from a lifetime of honing these skills. In combat, Aloy is a trick shot archer first and good with a spear second. In terms of utility, she knows how to track quarry, find and put herbs to use, is practiced at prying useful parts out of machinery, and is starting to dabble in tinkering (as we see her assemble her own trick arrows, a version of a grapple gun, and helps design an underwater rebreather).

Inventory:
-Her Focus
-The ”Death-seeker’s Shadow” - a bow that hits hard but is ultimately just a bow with some environmental storytelling implications due to where it’s found.

Samples:
-Meeting a combat android.
-Outcast clone is curious about old winter traditions.