[futurology] application

[nicearms]

APPLICANT INFO.
NAME: Nemo
CONTACT: pwnyo
CURRENT CHARACTERS:

CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Sigma Klim
CANON: Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
AGE: 22
APPEARANCE: Here
CANON POINT: End or Beginning? Route

BACKGROUND: Character Wiki and a written canon history and setting information, for reference.

PERSONALITY:
As is probably to be expected from a man with a Greek letter for a first name, quintessential college frat boy is the most accurate way to begin describing the social tendencies of Sigma Klim. He's a boisterous, animated, womanizing, yet altogether friendly and approachable young man. It might be a bit of a stretch to call him charismatic, as that suggests that he possesses a certain level of charm, but he's plenty open and social. Although, that does depend on your definition of "charm", and if yours happens to include things that mean well, but you can't help but cringe at them every now and again, he could pass for that. Even at the best of times, Sigma tends to stick his foot in his mouth, be it unintentionally, an ill-advised attempt to lighten the mood or simply the compulsion to get in a quality one-liner before the moment passes. From poorly timed puns to lewd commentary, his ability to wedge a faux pas into any conversation has to be an advertisable skill, but that isn't to say he is incapable of being serious; with a dire enough situation or someone to call him out, he shapes up sharp.

Even more notable than his social blundering, however, is his attitude when he actually means it. While his inappropriateness is never truly malicious, Sigma's got a catty streak a mile wide reserved for those who are dealing it out or being altogether unreasonable. More often than not, his heart remains pinned to his sleeve, and he tends to be easily riled up in all ways, shapes, and forms, from excitement and triumph to fury and fear; understandably, it's the source of a great deal of head-butting throughout the game. He can be prone to loud, useless, often vulgar outbursts in times of crisis, but he is usually able to cool his head and operate rationally once he gets all the panicking out of his system or has someone to shake him out of it. The only vivid emotions that don't seem to raise his volume are dread and shame, which adversely throws him into silence, but the same rules apply to his moping as they do to his panicking.

Generally speaking, Sigma is a very trusting individual; perhaps a beneficial trait in team-based exercises, but much more of a detriment in a game of alliances and betrayals such as his canon depicts, when nearly all of the other participants have their cards anywhere from close to their chest to up their sleeve. Unless given a good reason to distrust an opponent (still usually by "once bitten, twice shy" logic), he almost exclusively defaults to allying with them. In some instances where the player chooses to betray their opponent in spite of all logic, Sigma is dumbfounded, even ashamed by his own actions, going so far as to say it had felt like something unseen had moved his hand. Over the course of the game, his blind optimism is sobered slightly by the nature of his partners, as well as the makeshift bad-cop-to-his-good-cop Phi's reasoning, but he still remains one of the most likely candidates to extend an alliance. Hand in hand with this tendency to trust is a degree of openness and honesty he conducts himself with, if his candid emotions weren't enough of a hint. Not to say he's an overtly over-sharing or nosy person in a casual setting, but there's a big difference between personal privacy and potentially dangerous or vital information, one he can both respect and expect to be respected in kind. Teasing around such subjects often warrants irritation, indignation, or straight up anger depending on the severity of the situation. And depending on what sort of information or lack thereof he's provided with, he's hardly guilt-free in terms of jumping to conclusions. Such an emphatic and strongly opinionated person is bound to be swayed by their emotions at times, but unless he's repeatedly goaded with it, he can rationalize away drastic thoughts and actions. Despite his extremes, it's easy to tell that across the board that he's relatively easy to put back on an even keel, especially when the situation demands it.

For as observant a person as Sigma can be, he is significantly lacking when it comes to personal self-awareness. While there are no functional mirrors throughout the entire game, he remains completely oblivious to the fact that his body is 45 years older than what it should be. Nevermind that his hair is longer and thinner, his face is wrinkled, and his voice has probably changed, he is repeatedly referred to as "grandpa" and "senile" by people his own mental age, if not older than him, and subjected to a number of comments on his age. Not to mention that he also had a cybernetic eye which, even if it had provided flawless vision, stuck out from his face. Going one step further, he fails to notice that it is missing entirely and patched in 2029, as well as that his arms are nothing more than a skeletal metal framework. Whether it's due to whatever physical body he jumps into subconsciously accepting that these features are normal and unremarkable until he is outright forced to provide context for them with nonexistent memories or that he is simply that unconcerned with his state of being, it occasionally takes a flashing neon arrow being pointed directly in his face to get him to notice anything about himself.

Not to pose the segue as a jab at his sense of self-worth, which he has never explicitly struggled with, but Sigma also possesses a potent self-sacrificing streak, even for the sake of strangers. He's an inherently friendly and empathetic person, and combined with his trustful nature, he is quick to attach himself to new acquaintances, to the point of putting their lives before his if given half the chance. In one such life or death instance, even when holding the antidote to the poison he and his companions had been given, he forcibly injects Phi without the thought of administering it to himself so much as crossing his mind. In another, resident terrorist Dio takes an antidote they find together (needed by an infected child) and holds it hostage in exchange for Sigma promising to ally with him, a move which would both penalize Sigma and allow Dio to escape the game in one fell swoop. Sigma not only agrees, but follows through, just for the chance that Dio might keep his word.

One might expect such an outlook to be accompanied by a certain degree of fearlessness, but more often than not, these decisions are made in a state of absolute terror, only carried by the steel of his moral compass. Not a compulsion to be righteous, but simply right. He has a firm sense of it versus wrong, one that seems almost stupidly infallible when implemented on impulse, considering he once needed to be physically incapacitated to stop him from backtracking to look for missing players moments before the doors leading to the next portion of the game closed, which would have resulted in his death. But provided enough time, logic, or reason, he is at least capable of looking past the blinding white of his morals in order to see the best possible outcome. Such as betraying one amiable partner Clover after she agreed to ally with him only because circumstances guaranteed Dio's escape, and Clover would not have been able to earn enough points to escape no matter how either of them voted, while Sigma could. And even with this sound reasoning, he feels the utmost remorse for the decision. When he's faced with a proven untrustworthy opponent, however, he isn't an entirely open book, and can be capable of a certain level of deception. Such as when he received a subconscious hunch from other timelines that Dio was the one responsible for planting bombs in the facility, he circumvents trying to get the rest of the party to believe such a ridiculous concept by feinting around the topic until Dio spills enough information he shouldn't know to convict himself. While he may be less than informed in some areas, he does seem to have a grasp on how people tick, thanks in part to Phi's repeated rationalizations of human psychology over the course of the game.

All in all, Sigma is a very ordinary person thrown into a very extraordinary situation, and he knows it full well. He can talk big and hype himself up when it comes to the little things, but in the end, he's easily humbled by just how far out of his league everything feels. He doesn't accept taking on responsibility for the fate of the human race because he feels as if he can, but because he is the only person who can. One of the biggest sacrifices a man can make, really. Not to give his life, but to live it. Live all of it exactly according to plan. Even if he didn't have much of a choice in the matter, it takes a certain kind of man to step up to something like that without breaking down, and it's not a blazingly confident one, but one responsible, dedicated, and altruistic to his core, no matter how much of a dudebro space case he might seem to be at the surface.


ABILITIES:
Physically speaking, Sigma is a tall, fit, broad-shouldered young man. While he doesn't have any professional training, his strength and endurance make him a force to be reckoned with (at least when dealing with other normal human beings). He has cybernetic arms that integrate seamlessly with his body, which are slightly more powerful and resilient, and whatever is injected into the artificial skin covering them is transferred to his blood stream, be it medication or poison. Other than that, he is still an average human being when it comes to supernatural abilities.

Mentally, he is a college student and Ph.D hopeful, and has the selective intelligence to match. It's never explicitly stated what he is studying, but all context points to medicine and/or genetic engineering. Sigma also has a strong photographic memory, and is capable of memorizing complex patterns and long nonsense strings of numbers or letters after seeing or hearing them once.

Last but not least, Sigma is an Esper. As such, he is capable of transferring his consciousness between alternate versions of himself in different timelines. While he isn't really able to control it, it is shown to be triggered most reliably by life-or-death situations, and depending on which end of the stick that version of him gets, he either jumps ship moments before dying back to an earlier time, or is replaced by a consciousness that had previously survived the encounter and thus has the knowledge to survive again. To preserve the timeline the game runs on, only the latter will ever occur.

INVENTORY:
The clothes on his back.

WRITING SAMPLES.
NETWORK SAMPLE:
[ Hello, Oska, someone's fiddled around enough figure out the video! Looks like some dude in a blue polo, and the feed cuts in halfway through a little noise of triumph under his breath. ]

Alright, we all know how asking to see a manager goes in these kinds of situations, so I'm gonna skip the whole who are you and what do you want with us spiel. I mean, if it really was an accident that we ended up here in the first place, they don't want anything to do with us anyway, yeah? Nice of them to accommodate us like this, even if we gotta pay our own way home...

Maybe if we're lucky we can make a house call while I'm on the clock here, god knows it could use some work... But I guess that's my business—hell, the last thing it needs is even more complicating.

So! Uh. [ The sound draws out as he appears to lean back, running a hand through his hair. ] What can you do, right?

Might as well get to know each other. [ And he's back in frame with gusto! Grin's a little tired, but it's an easy one. Like he's been around the college meet-and-greet block a couple dozen times. ] Name's Sigma. I'm from SoCal, USA... Earth, I guess. I'm doing grad school, working on my Ph.D—or at least I was, before all this-that-and-the-other-thing. Now I do, uh... Well, I do a lot of volunteer work.

A lot of volunteer work.

[ The repetition sounded as if it took about four times the effort, but it doesn't bum him out for too long. ] Looking forward to sharing it with you guys, now!

[ Unfortunately, the attempted wink ends up a bit hampered by the fact that the eye opposite is a pretty inanimate, featureless cybernetic one—a fact Sigma seems to realize about half a second before the video cuts off. ]

LOG SAMPLE: One + Overflow | Two + Overflow