Ah, you think you know so much | you whose anger is a pet dog...

SirensPull App [VS: 2.0] (1-5-12 edition)

2012-01-06T07:24:55Z

Player Information

Name: Skunky (“Skuun”) or “Thumbs”
Age: 22
AIM SN: Bluh. AIM doesn’t work for me. I have a plurk (egregiousDerp) and a Yahoo (sweet_jumpin_jillybeans). If the AIM thing ever changes, I’ll be sure to let everyone know, though.
email: sweet_jumpin_jillybeans@yahoo.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Erm. Yes. But only one big one. (Hometrail.) And it’s been a while. Mostly I’m a dressing room haunt, so I could probably use a little help anyway, and would totally appreciate people letting me know if I’m fundamentally screwing something.
Currrently Played Characters: None. Not here, anyway.
Conditional: Activity Check Link: Not applicable
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Aaaaand I don’t have one because I’m kind of a moron. Sorry.

Character Information

General
Canon Source: the DOGS manga is licensed in the United States by VIZ media and scanlated a bunch of other places by enthusiastic folks I don’t actually know.
Canon Format: Erm. While there’s an OVA for the prelude stuff which is pretty much exactly the same as “book zero”, I’m working from the DOGS/DOGS: Bullets and Carnage mangas. (Also because the motion-animation for the DOGS OVA kind of sucks something disappointing.)
Character's Name: Heine Rammsteiner ~~Yes, like the band. Apparently the author/artist is a fan. And yes, if I get in, anyone can have fun with fourthwalling that.~~
Character's Age: Not given. He could be anywhere from about seventeen to his mid-twenties, and it never seems to be terribly important to him to figure out exactly where in that range he is any moreso than it’s important to him to figure out the rest of his past. (The phrase “Soldiers aren’t born, they’re made” comes to mind…) It’d probably even be within his character to give different ages just to be ornery. By all means, try to card him for buying alcohol and M-rated video games for trouble. He has no I.D. He’s probably legal for everything. Not that it matters where he comes from or that he’s likely to indulge in anything.

What form will your character's NV take? Uhm. Just slap him some sort of standard cell phone-thing with simple, standard features for voice, video, and text features. That in and of itself’ll probably be mind-blowing enough to this dystopian fellow who’s used to land lines and pay phones.
Unless…you want to do something really mind-blowing and crazy with me and have his NV be two-part: where all text and voice features are handled phone-wise and the video feature is partially embedded in his collar itself, broadcasting video seen through his eyes when emotionally triggered. It’d probably be fun to have his NV features be limited in the phone because he himself worked as a partial NV, but it’s cool if it’s just the phone. (Samples are written for presumed “just a phone”. I’ll change them appropriately and gladly if the collar!video feature is approved.)

Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Hoo boy.
Right, so the given canon abilities of the Cerberus Collar (or “spine”) given to soldiers of the “Rammsteiner” series are listed out indirectly in “Giovanni’s first report card” (front page, chapter eleven) as

--Regenerative Ability
--Pathogen Resistance
--Muscular and Skeletal Strength
--Neural Activity in Unused Brain Regions

Of these abilities, their displayed use within the series varies on emotional state of the user to some extent. (That is, Heine seems to regenerate faster when he’s pushed harder; when he’s riled, angry, or excited.)

Some like the “Neural Activity” bit only have implied uses so far as I’ve seen, and none of them seem to be to Heine’s benefit. (Giovanni tends to appear and goad Heine in the form of dreams, or even hallucinations, which might be a sign of the neural side, but it’s not like he’s suddenly developed telekinisis or the ability to shoot lasers out of his eyes.) The alleged “Pathogen Resistance” hasn’t been used at all, even, in canon, for all the fact we assume it’s there since it seems to be a standard package deal for your average childhood-in-metaphorical-hell home-grown cerberus soldier. We’ll assume it’s because a canon which allows genetic engineering probably has dabbled in bio-weaponry, and it actually makes strategic sense. It’s resistance, anyway, not immunity.

As for the other two abilities, Muscular/Skeletal strength has been used to punch through people’s bodies (he tears his sister in two pieces with his bare hands), bust out of handcuffs, break down doors, and bite off cheeks…it even leads to some really improbably strong chain-fighting in Heine’s case. (Ie: normal people with normal physics don’t usually snap other peoples’ wrists with their gun chains, or break necks with sheer momentum.) In short, he’s a lot stronger than he looks, and this natural ability has been accentuated by implied years of weapons training and hand-to-hand death-brawls. If nothing else, Heine rather explicitly and obviously knows how to fight, and he’s generally stronger and tougher than the average person in ways that blur the superhuman line.

The “regenerative ability”, though, is probably the most outstanding feature of all. Puppy here is effectively immortal to anything but a fatal head wound. (I spent a truly ridiculous amount of studying his fight sequences, and he regenerates from superficial facial wounds, too, it turns out.) You can pump him full of bullets, and he’ll get up and return the favor most likely. How long it takes him to do so is the only debatable thing, and as previously mentioned, the rate seems variable according to the amount of stress he’s under, or, more informally put, the “zone” he’s in.

If he’s in a “killing mood” or fired up, he regenerates almost instantly. (Seen in gun-fights with Giovanni, or a whole wing of mafiosa, for example.) If he’s taken by surprise, it seems to take him a matter of… minutes, perhaps, if I’m generous on the side of caution. (As in the “book 0” base DOGS story where he takes a shotgun blast to the gut and falls out of a window, and actually lies there dead for a bit before his collar wakes him.) Also, in Heine’s case, having his inner “dog” running him also seems to alter that power-use-rate (ie: his “superpowered evil side”, or what’s known in the story as the “first spine”), if he’s fighting that other self down, it also seems to take him longer to utilize the abilities of his collar. I’d even go so far as to say he might indirectly be inhibiting it. (Whether he actually wants to die for real is part of Heine’s mystery psychological package, which just adds to that. More on the first spine bit at the end of this next section on weaknesses.)

Weaknesses of this design are as follows as near as I can figure:

--Heine’s an albino, albeit, an albino impervious to conventional damage. He still seems to dislike sunlight, maybe even bright light in general. (“It’s a pain to go to the surface and I can’t stand the sun.”—presuming this statement is truthful and not just a brush-off to Badou, which…could be debated.) That he might have somewhat imperfect vision is a possibility just based on his imperfect accuracy with a gun, though that could be anything, truthfully, from a side-effect of his dual-wielding style (which traditionally reduces accuracy), to even a lambent apathy towards killing certain victims.

I tend to play on the side of less-than-perfect daytime vision regardless, and use it for heightened stun-value on the part of opponents in a fight. (This mun’s a pale-eyed indoors-dweller, and bright sunlight gives me some trouble, so I think I could play it as such more accurately. If this bit seems like headcanon, or comes off as a longshot otherwise, I can modify or remove it.)

--Since the head is a weak point, Heine’s used to fighting to protect it, and dodges especially quickly away from head-blows whereas he seems perfectly willing to take damage in other areas. This could be noted by a clever fighter, though actually shooting him in the head (shooting just being a random example) might be difficult thanks to his abilities. It still probably counts as a possible Achilles heel to someone observant enough to notice, and ruthless enough to attempt to exploit it. It’s the only real way to kill him, and it’s quite possible even not-killing him but landing a head blow would slow him down as he tried to sort out his urges after and control his instinct to lash out. (Possibly seen with Naoto during their battle couple moment with Luki and Noki when she hits him in the face with her sword hilt, and he drops the weapon!girl he’s been sadistically choking, seeming to come back to himself.)

--A last mixed weakness/strength is his possession of the “first spine”. His second personality, if you will. And a fairly evil/psychotic one at that. (Instead of covering the “first spine” personality in the personality section, I’m covering it briefly here since it’s not really “Heine”.)

Heine’s “dog” for the most part is your standard inner evil voice who talks about “coming out and playing”. It appears to have no remorse, no boundaries, and as the cherry on the top of the cake, it’s the force responsible for him killing his sister, Lily—something Heine not only never forgives himself for, but which has serious emotional impact on him to say the least. As he fights, he constantly also fights to hold this “dog” in check-and he’s very good at it. Many test subjects were given attempted bonding with the first spine, and Heine was the only success, and the only willing subject, for that matter. He wanted to be stronger, and be the leader who got him and his companions, or even his “siblings” so to speak, out of their captivity. That this desire on his part turned out so horribly wrong, and left him susceptible, in a way, to this invading personality, is likewise something he’s never forgiven himself for. If anything, though, it might explain why he’s forcibly become the “master” personality, and the first spine is the “dog”.

It’s hard to tell because of his bio augumentation mixed in with this double-person bit if Heine’s mentally very strong, or mentally very susceptible to outside mind control, or paradoxically both because of the level of modification to his system. (He’s designed to be commanded, as it were, first spine or no first spine, and strong will or not. And the “increased neural activity” section above seems to have only down sides for a man on the run as I said earlier.)

Relative susceptibility probably depends on his awareness of an act of force towards his mind, and how much his “dog” personality interferes with and sabotages him if an outside force attempts to act. Whether he’s “sensitive” to it or not in practice, the idea of being controlled by anyone is something he reacts to with anger.

At the same time, though, the presence of that second personality makes him better at synchronizing and achieving levels of function with his spine abilities that even the others of his “class” don’t have, making it a mixed advantage even though the fact it’s an aware entity in its own right is certainly a disadvantage. And, as mentioned before, holding back that personality and pushing it down—while it doesn’t seem to be particularly difficult for him—affects Heine’s rate of use for all his abilities, and particularly slows his regeneration along with whatever other troubles he might bring himself for hesitating long enough to regain control of himself.

When his “dog” personality takes over completely, it’s probably best to run just as hard as you would from any other capriciously sadistic cat-and-mouse maniac with a gun, though.

Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? Hahahaa. Right. No, I think we’re done, there. Unless you think he’d be better with lasers. (Please don’t think he’d be better with lasers.)

Weapons: Two guns, listed as a Mauser C-96 (his righthand white gun) with an attached chain he uses as a weapon in close-combat in its own right, (disarming people, or snapping limbs), and his black Luger P08 pistol. He carries both in back-pocket-like leg-strap holsters without making much serious attempt to hide them. (Depends on which coat he decides to wear, though.)

He also has a knife he pulls on Giovanni in their fight in book one, though. (At least…I think it’s a knife. It’s something switch-blade like, curved back, and nastily serrated. What it could be if it isn’t a knife isn’t something I can come up with a name for off the top of my head.)

Heine carries several spare clips on him for more prolonged gunfights, presumably in his arse-enal. (Ahahahahah. No. Really. You can see him switch them out in initial battle sequences with a warehouse full of mafiosa followed by a battle with Giovanni, so this isn’t just making arsenal soup. Given the trouble he and his partner get into, it’s not that surprising.)* Note if you need to know a better estimate: a full mauser clip stores ten rounds, and a luger stores nine.

Ah. Aaaand he has a propensity for spiked platform boots. Almost forgot those. He likes to drop kick people in the face when he’s too apathetic to pull out the guns. On the off chance I can’t find an example picture showing them, it looks like they have three spikes each—two coming out kind of “hammerhead” style in the front, and a prong in the back. Maybe they’re not fatal weapons, but they’re definitely weapons. ~~Not that he’s Bayonetta or anything. Just…Consider the boots his variant on the classic anime paper-fan-for-idiots.~~

History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
The wiki link is here, but it probably needs what passes for a little supplementation with me.

The world of DOGS is definitely post-apocalyptic sci-fi, what with references to a "climate disaster" (followed up with "You know this planet used to have four seasons?") and definite evidence of "genetic technology running wild." That aside, it seems to mostly revolve around an environment which includes subterranean mad-scientists, genetic fetish mutants, and petty mafiosi, with every man woman and child slinging a gun, a sword, or at least a set of adorably petite flightless wings. Heine himself is a collared and tagged experiment after a fashion, "built as a weapon" in the midst of all that with said feel of lapsed technology and disaster as (debatably) the most sci-fi-afflicted member of the main cast.

Much of his history is implied. For starters, Heine has selective amnesia for bits of his past. He doesn't remember anything before waking up in a dark room, wandering out, and seeing a bunch of other children with collars around their necks just like him, immediately thrown into a life as a living weapon fighting day and night to stay alive, slave to the "Spine of Cerberus" (Also translated "Spine of Kerabos") a fragment of which seems to have been embedded in his own spine, producing regeneration even from death itself. I'd say he could be anywhere from ten to thirteen at the starting point, maybe older, but the exact timing is still fairly fuzzy, and the purpose undeniably twisted.

Through the tales of other characters, there's record of a past mass disappearance of children in the area, giving a potential clue to Heine's pre-lab origins. (He’s perhaps even a clone of the “mayor” of the city, for that matter.) Heine also feels kinship to the far younger, mute, winged fetish-mutant Nill, claiming "she's just like me, a thing created for someone else's desire." All in all, it's difficult to pinpoint Heine's exact origin from this point in canon with so many possibilities around. And as an experiment, and an "altered thing" if not an entirely artificial existence, having amnesia-blots in his memory is something Heine seems, if not comfortable with, then at least resigned to. Even if he is born naturally, his existence has a very artificial, "created" feel.

What we do know about him from his personality (excuse the overlap) is that his serious jumpiness around women stems from killing his sister in a particularly nasty way in this largely implied past he doesn’t elaborate on to people. (The picture shown so far is of half a girl embracing him, torn in two, with only poor Heine's numbly horrified face visible, loosely holding her. She’s still alive, even after that, being what he is, so he crushes her skull with his hands while she’s embracing him and he’s come back to full awareness of himself.) He's "thought" on at least one occasion of it as a nightmare where he lost control and punched his hands right through her. ~~DOGS is M-rated for a reason. It's pretty violent.~~

There’s only one survivor of their Rammsteiner class, and that’s his “unfavorite” brother, Giovanni, who’s taken to calling on him with taunting and gunfights, and spirited rivalry. Giovanni battles with Heine while mafia-thugs get caught up in the background between two regenerating psychopaths... Heine refuses to follow Giovanni back into the underground, and...

After that refusal, and after discovering his blind "caretaker" the lolita-happy priest known as "Bishop" seems to have an earlier version of the Cerberus-spine collar, identifying himself as "Ernst Rammsteiner, the first failed experiment" with the casually added, "I guess I should call you 'brother'...but you'd hate that, wouldn't you?", a train barrels out from the underground spewing monstrous troops in dogs-masks with matching katana out into the populace, and Heine rather reluctantly battles them, instructing others in how to kill the regenerating "troops"--troops that are created, or perhaps more appropriately "manufactured" the same way he is. During one particularly fierce battle alongside the sword-wielding amnesiac, Naoto, and the “demi-human” fetish mods under “Granny Liza”, Heine faces Giovanni again, headshots him with what appears to be a trace of true regret, and is shocked when Giovanni gets back up again, shooting him back in the chest, his only weak point apparently neutralized. With that, Giovanni bids him adieu and proceeds to blow up a large section of the city, living to meet his “brother” another day.

At the point Heine’s taken from, the train's directors' modus operandi is yet unknown and Heine's tag-team partner Badou Nails is wrapping up an investigation which has left him pretty badly hospitalized while the rest of the city recovers from the underground’s onslaught, and Heine has a nice long inner flashback, followed by meeting Magato Fuyumine, and sparring for a bit while Magato taunts his “sister”, Naoto, just as she discovers the real connection between her Campanella Fruhling. (Good old Heine. He’s just kind of hanging out and trying not to get stabbed by knife-happy Magato.)

~~Then he’s in Canada. Poof.~~

Point in Canon: I'm taking him from chapter 65-ish. (So he's not having a big stab-fest or whatever with Magato.)

Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: Let’s see... Ah. Hometrail. He got kicked out of a city for being a “vampire”, met Cloud Strife and privately boggled over the fact that they had the same voice, arrived at a place with seasons, where he was stuck communicating exclusively through song… (Allusions to which will probably tinge all first impressions of Canada in winter.) And roomed with a Romance-of-the-Three-Kingdoms-era Chinese general he may or may not have actually developed a grudging bit of respect for considering Zhou Yu didn’t flip out and didn’t seem impressed by the level of destruction Heine wrought on the room in a passive-aggressive attempt to have it all to himself.

Badou here at sirenspull is the same one from Hometrail, ~~we muns are kind of friends for whatever it’s worth, and Jakkun’s a lovely terrible enabler~~ so if they both have memories of it, that might lead to some interesting CR for why Heine shows up who knows how many months later. It would make his guilt fantastic. If nothing else, I want that.

(Also, since I’m assuming there have been previous Heines at SP, this being a big place and all, if there’s anything I need to brush up on or incorporate here that you’d like, I’d be happy to do so.)

Character Personality: ~~And then there was textblock shamelessly altered from my last app.~~
There's some element of cultivated external "badassery" at work here if that's a term I can use in a proper sense. In the proverbial young, rebellious "eff you and the horse you rode in on" sense that talks gutter-trash, lives in the big bad city, and sometimes gets involved with sundries and comes out on top due to being just that badass. It's the larger-than-life gunslinger, the urban mafiosa thug, and the shell-shocked soldier rolled all into one, coated in a light veneer of "coolness". He's that gloomy, grim, black-leather-wearing pale guy who walks out at night, sees pimps after their runaway prostitutes and shrugs to himself in a cool-headed gravel monotone that he can't get involved in every single little thing in a fallen, gritty world. It's bleak, monochrome, and with a touch of proper noir, and maybe a splash of blood here and there.

Heine’s overall feel is that of cultivated genre-savviness trying to make sense of a dystopian universe. With his past, it's unsurprising that Heine would identify partially in larger-than-life fictional archetypes--it's hard for him to be only human when he’s debatably immortal and made to fill a role bigger than life, and his like is found in fiction more readily than in "reality" even as defined within his world. Basically, he seems to live in a sort of insulated shell he makes for himself.

Underneath the Noir-Emulation, Heine's strung out pretty tightly between the invariable backlash from the sheer volume of nasty in his past, and keeping his proverbial berserker switch off. His gynophobia (fear of women) is legendary enough—enough that even a waitress offering him coffee in a way that catches him off-guard will make him jump back like you're something dangerous, and touching him (God forbid) is enough to send him into a full-out head-grabbing fit to control himself while veins bulge in his throat and he has a literal spazz out, flashing back to memories of his dead sister, Lily. He just can't emulate a normal reaction to women except undeniable chilliness no matter how hard he tries. And no matter how much he tweaks the outer image and plays the part of a normal human, there’s no doubt he feels isolated, while at once he tries to preserve that isolation as much as he can out of a sort of perverse need to protect people.

It’s quite straightforward and unfussed the way most of the things eh deals with are: his past is trouble. And he’s all too aware that other people aren’t indestructible. It’s almost impossible he doesn’t have a morbid streak to his protection, while his past makes it impossible for him to let himself forget he can’t protect everyone the way he’d like. His confidantes are few and far between, and his tendency to volunteer information is next to nonexistent.

Those ties he makes are few, and unbreakable, and as secretly one-sided as he can make them, which…isn’t very onesided, considering he has Badou, Nill, Bishop, and even perhaps Naoto, and the constant reminder in his rival, Giovanni, that just because he’s friends with someone doesn’t mean they can’t blame him for what happens to them as a result. His only volunteered whispered confessions of strain are to a mute who can’t say anything back. Heine is survivor’s guilt personified, and rendered taciturn, spilling out a mental monologue narrating everything he does to himself, and holding on to the past, constantly worrying it like a bone.

Paradoxically in all his archetypical dragging and self-casting, are his mundane moments. He might have a secretly rich imagination, and be a walking weapon, but he's also the guy who stays up all night playing video games even though he's playing, not because he likes them, but because he can't sleep and doesn't want to dwell on much of anything. But on the outside, this probably looks like contrasting normality.

He has his tastes: old black and white movies, and pixilated first-person shooters... It's one thing to live your life being forged into a weapon, but another to live it in reality. There's a lot of space between, as he seems to have learned over the years, and it needs to be taken up somehow, even if you don't have an interest in it. He's neither depressed nor content, but simply existing, waiting for the right scrap of information to lead him back. In a way, he’s probably killing time like he kills everything else, but I’d wonder if he isn’t sure which feels better: normality and all its boredom, or being caught in the middle of strife like he’s made to e.

In the many spaces between murder and mayhem, pretty much at a loss to explain all the things he’s been through, (No matter how he tries to make sense of it and even narrate it in his head) or how or why he comes to a conclusion with such a wildly different past to base it off of, Heine generally comes off as apathetic in his day-to-day interactions. Unsociable. In a way, that probably suits him fine, too, because what’s normal for people, anyway, except being the exact opposite of what he’s made to be like when he fights? It’s not as if he can really tell.

There’s no doubt that, if anything, is one of Heine’s fundamental beliefs, it’s that because he’s a created “thing”, he’s made only for one thing: fighting.

It's not his intent to be horrifying, though some aspects of him are. He grimly admits he sees himself as a monster, but there's no drama, or self-hatred to the statement. It's simply what he is. He's disgusted with the fact he's alive and others aren't, he admits to Nill, but it's hard to tell if it’s because of what he’s been made into, or because he sees death as a wholly human thing—something he can never really achieve. On the hairline between accepting and submitting to his inner "dog" and those who would use him, between self-destructing in some misguided penance, or giving into his urges for violence for their own sake, Heine maintains control enough to stop at listless, gloomy introspection, and his fairly passionless attitude of waiting, and all things considered, and considering how else he could be taking it, he thinks that’s pretty good. Maybe the best he’ll get. Maybe not.

For all that he plays up a "hair-trigger-about-to-snap" persona duality to those who actually do know about his reckless battle-style, and horrifying violent side, he still holds back. The violence is actually quite alienated from his "real" personality. And, because he was born into it from his first memory, violence is sort of something he takes for granted. It just happens. It has no bearing on him, really, and it’s almost peaceful, even, sometimes. But is it human to see things that way, or just another mark that makes him a “monster”?

It's not to say he can't be set off and set off really badly, but for a situation to be bad enough for Heine to let himself go, and rely on his second inner personality (Which really is inhuman and a monster) is much more unusual than he'd let on: while he's quite messed up, he isn't stupid by any means, nor without conscience for all the methodical attempts made to deaden it in his brutal past. His collar, and the personality in it are the function he's "built" for, but they certainly don't control him unless he lets them, and that in and of itself seems to just cause more questions for him, in a way. Attacking him, harming him, or particularly landing a blow and triggering an instance where he needs to regenerate, often trigger moments of brutal repayment, but they're single moments, solitary actions, and Heine himself surfaces soon after, oddly adjusted to it all, but often visibly moodied.

It’s pretty clear he isn’t a cruel person for all he seems to think he might be, or should be. He doesn’t see or even think clearly about the fact all the things he regrets come from heroism. He’s an undoubted pessimist, and the ends which came about make the means despicable to him no matter what you might tell him otherwise. He doesn’t find himself admirable. He doesn’t find himself worth liking, and so he reacts badly to any attempts at expressing he’s either on the part of other people. It’s not simply that he can’t take a compliment—it’s more that he has no reason to believe it.

Yet, for all the times he'll let Badou get captured, beat up, and even mildly tortured, he never once actually lets his partner get seriously enough hurt to not lend him a hand in mopping up the situation. (Especially given Badou's own maniacally violent side when deprived of nicotine for long enough--usually about ten minutes.) His internal thoughts about seeing pimps after runaway prostitutes and not being able to get involved in every single one implies that sometimes he does indeed get involved when it's not his business—as he does when rescuing Nill. And when Naoto feints, even Heine's legendary inability to even get near to women, while certain to make him step out of the way, can't actually let him allow her to drop the whole way and hurt herself. That little bit of him probably just makes the determination not to lose control that much stronger, stemming especially from his experience losing control absolutely and killing his sister Lily.

But is it human, and is it enough?
No. Of course not. Perhaps it never will be.

His best kept secret is probably that Heine actually likes people. Some of them anyway, which is the same to him as liking people in general. The same as having two weak points instead of just one. He's got an undeniably interesting way of showing it, and sure doesn't think it's a good idea to try to display this liking in anything less than veiled, almost playful little moments of gravel-deadpan, but if he didn't like people he wouldn't have any qualms at all about letting them get hurt even though he'd rather everyone in the universe sit back and think of him as a monotoned icecube.

There are exceptions to his apparent "hands-off" attitude, and demeanor, and there are things he jumps in for when he has no business doing so. It's something he's sort of privately irritated by: someplace in the recesses of killing machine, there's a beating heart that actually likes looking after Nill and making sure she has her frilly dresses. And there's part of him that likes listening to Badou whine about things in a satisfactorarily distracting manner even though he'll put on a show of retaliatory blunt insult and abuse. And there's a part of him still, which cares enough about what happens to those "like him" to protect them. Those parts don't really fit in with his "design", and he's aware of it in the most dimly, vaguely awkward way: it's too human. And he's still not sure what to make of it.

That said, even then part of his apparent insensitivity might just be lack of understanding. Pain is "just pain" and that pain doesn't last. When he regenerates, granted, it hurts, but he has an inadvertent insensitivity to the cumulative continuousness of pain and its effect on other people. It's something he likely finds curious. And that curiosity might be a better reason he lets the constantly-whining Badou get a little roughed up before wandering in to snatch him out of perpetual trouble for the umpteenth time: Badou of all people definitely lets you know when he's hurt, and more than killing people outright or regenerating, the slow healing process of wounds is probably interesting to Heine in a way that's neither sadistic nor masochistic, but almost innocent for all the fact that he truly doesn't understand it and has to approach it with the odd bluntness and distance of any other relational aspect he tries to figure out that adds up “human”, and proves to him there’s something he lacks.

As with Nill, after all, as Heine explains, scientists always take something away from you when they give you something. It’s their way of keeping a creation from being superior to its creator.

That said, his sense of humor might also have something to do with how he treats Badou. Humor's just another bit of his growing humanity shining through more than anything: It's said humor is the mark of an interrupted defense mechanism, and Heine's nothing but defense and attack instincts. His humor is decidedly dry, particularly appreciative of irony and he certainly derives amusement from putting other people in situations. (Particularly certain loud, constantly whining chain smokers.)He'll literally cough up bullets and say he had some cheap candy stuck in his throat.

At his best, at his most oddly affectionate, a person could expect him to unrepentantly shut them down, insult their attempts at being clever, and tell them what he thinks of their suggestion that he at any time take his orders from you. Because maybe, just maybe he can hide, even from himself, just a little while longer that he isn’t actually cold and unfeeling when he follows around his “people”. Maybe without knowing it, but always like his namesake dog.

With Badou, he paradoxically has the greatest and most absurd intimacy in how he’ll actually bump shoulders with him and not be consumed with over-awareness of it. He’s downright used to Badou as long as he isn’t taken further off guard. He's still got more triggers than a gun shop there for mood-dampeners, but he's also clearly had some time to work out what's hanging over him so he's not the total inhuman basket case he might have been, and he can function with what passes for normality for…oh…possibly an aspergers patient.

But at least that’s human. He’ll take what he can get there.
And he probably intends to keep working at it a little while longer for the sake of a very select few, to see if maybe he can figure out where he stands on the line between demi-human and really, truly human.

Conditional: Personality development in previous game: Er. I think I covered it all in the Previous Game History above. Sorry I not separating the two made this more complicated. It wasn’t intentional.
The above hasn’t really overtly softened Heine’s personality in any way. It’s just kind of consistent with it as it stands. Those people above just kind of…stuck around and he got attached to them, so to speak. Though…I guess the troll classifications on romance have kind of shaken him a little on some level, particularly how his rivalry with his “younger brother”, Giovanni was taken, and his partnership with Badou. It makes him uncomfortable, so he might be a little more distant to either initially to reassert his own mildly freaked out personal sense of NO HOMO.

Character Plans: Well. Rescuing his buddy-partner Badou from lots of crap. (It always happens. WHAT’S WITH ALL THESE WOMEN.) Hanging with Nill. And probably getting checked out pretty fiercely by any X-verse mutants, and/or propositioned by secret politically oriented parties/factions throughout the city.

Really he just wants to stay home and be an insomniac and play video games all night, but we all know that almost certainly isn’t going to happen, because created super-soldiers never get many days off.

Also, possibly discovering snow. Seriously, what’s with all these seasons. And what the Hell is Canada, anyway? (Dystopian universe with implied climate tweaking is dystopian.)

More or less, I’m cool with all of the things.

Oh. Uhm. Except romance. Probably not happening with this guy. Ever. But you knew that already.

Appearance/PB:No PB, but his is what he looks like, plus a few special notes.
Hey, it’s that zombie pale guy.
Yes, he really does have white hair.
And he's cuddly and good-tempered as long as you don't call him names~

Stealing shamelessly from the last time I apped him, PLEASE NOTE that without the neck-bandage, he has a pretty nasty-looking contraption actually bolted into his neck. It’s NOT SUBTLE, and would be something to comment on if you see it. ~~Or if you’re Magneto.~~
There's a scar stretching down Heine's spine about mid-back, going past his hairline stopping about level with his earlobes in the back. It's the only one he'll ever keep, and it goes under that bolt in the back. If you look real hard at the back of his head, you might notice the scar going up and through, because he can't bandage himself like a mummy. Mostly the bandages are there to hide the collar, not the scar, so that’s another thing you can go off of if you’re a doctor-type or you really really want the CR-laden talk which goes with the collar. (I’m down with it, but warn for potential violence if you go about it the wrong way. Just saying. It could be a point of apathy, or it could be a point for triggers depending on how you broach the topic.)

Here. Have a neck-shot for more detail and some naked people. (G'darnit Badou.)

Also, for a little more detail for characters going off of first impressions? There's a sort of uhm...waist-up naked shot for the original DOGS book "0" (because hey, it's M-rated anyway. Sorry, but I'm not putting it up because Naoto's distracting with her chest-scar and...well...chest.) That shot makes clear that Heine's about 172 cm tall. That's just under 5'8" even if his hair might give him another inch or two. So he's not a big guy. (I can’t say that with enough emphasis.)
And he has his attitude.
Since a lot of people go on toughness based on size at least in part, that might be good to know. (If you play a bully, or a villain who likes to goad or pry, this might be good to know, I thought.)

Writing Samples

First Person Sample
[The video feed starts with a click and a blurred scanning of the nocturnal landscape of the snow-covered baseball diamond, with a black-gloved thumb shifting over a good half of the lens. A glimpse of movement in the shadows, followed by another dizzying blur of movement, a mutter as the camera focuses downward in the grainy darkness. There’s a glint of metal, footwards, the crunching shift of a shoe in fresh snow. A few more clicks—something hard interacting with the outer shell of the device—and the soft metal noise of a chain moving, the safety of a gun being thumbed off, and that same softly irritable, flat voice called out into the darkness.]

Haven’t you pack of mangy strays had enough? I thought I just finished with you.

[The voice adds so quietly it’s hard to hear afterwards,]

Giovanni…?

[There’s a snap of movement, and the deafening crack of gunfire. The rolling video clatters into a patch of ice, filming the clear sky, almost perfectly black but for a spot of moonlight, the all too suggestive sound of violence filling the background before the feed times out.]

Third Person Sample
All things considered, passing through was relatively simple. It felt like the dreamy tickle in the base of his skull when he was nearly dead, just before the hard jolt of resurrection. The jolt never came, replaced by the gentle sensation of air. Of wind, of-

Falling.

He snapped his arms around his head instinctively before impacting. Feet first, teeth gritted against the flash of pain. Sure enough, his neck burned a moment before diffusing down his spine into the sensation of his bones resetting, clicking back into place, and mending, the hair fractures in his shins vanishing. He could feel his heart hammering. Waking to a three story drop would do it to you every time.

He sniffed, breathing in biting cold. The smell of-

Snow?

Heine’s nose wrinkled. There was only one instance with snow in his memory, and it felt more like a dream than anything else. Seasons. He hadn’t dreamed of a place with seasons since…

Well. It didn’t matter, anyway.

He could feel the cold well enough, not that it’d kill him. But those slow, stealthy noises behind the fence…those noises just outside of normal hearing…those might be a little more pressing. He was aware of them more from the feel of the hairs on the back of his neck prickling against the metal bolted over his skin.

His hands reached for his guns, paused, picked out the foreign object wedged into his mauser holster.

For the first time since he’d been dropped, Heine blinked, thrown for a loop.

What the Hell…

“What is this, Star Trek…?” He whispered to himself, breath frosting a cloud in the air as he prodded the cheerfully glowing screen, and…stared. (Good. He was talking. Not singing.)

The screen appeared to have cute puppies on it.

A slow, methodical struggle took place in Heine’s head. He’d dealt with a lot of strange dreams, but none of them had ever involved the appearance of sci-fi devices equipped with puppies in his gunbelt. There was even a little pouch on his belt, thoughtfully waiting for the addition of a mystery electronic thing. That was sinister if nothing else was. Who not only snuck a really garish piece of equipment onto you in a strange place with seasons, but left you a holster for it like it was a weapon?

He squinted at the screen with that thought, and prodded it again to see if it was some sort of sci-fi weapon. The puppies vanished, but nothing else seemed to happen.

The shuffle behind the fence brought him out of the moment.

Right. He could shoot the possible tracking device or whatever the Hell it was once he finished figuring out what the lurking thing in the dark was, and whether or not he should shoot it. Violence was much more comfortable ground than cute puppy devices, anyway.

[TV TROPES MEME]

2011-02-11T16:17:55Z

((Sorry for the disorganization. Subject to update~))

ANTIHERO
Well. Obviously. But a good kind of antihero. Heine ends up doing a lot more good guy stuff than bad guy stuff, but he's violent as anything if you rouse him.
He violates the conventional QUIET ONE themes in that he's not all that physically imposing (he's about 5'8" minus his platform boots.) and sort of medium build on top of that. (Unlike Mihai, who's a more conventional cut for that particular trope.) Though he is fairly taciturn and seems to go through huge flashbacks and brush them off with a moody sentence, and it turns out despite his build he has legitimate inhuman powers thanks to his collar.
He's kept from being a complete INEFFECTUAL LONER because of the influence of Badou, his partner, and a few other close relationships with Nill or Bishop.

Theoretically, (Meaning head-canon) Heine looks and acts like what he does because he's ironically GENRE SAVVY in a weird way. He canonically likes movies, and playing video games. It seems he's self-taught to emulate a certain type of character he thinks he fits into. Being made what he is literally in terms of a physical weapon by an outside force, re-making his image into an anti-hero living to demolish the influence of his past, and maybe save a few fetish mods along the way while affecting being an antisocial jerk, would obviously be a little appealing to someone with the experience that more obvious acts of heroism or leadership end up killing everyone around him.

ASEXUALITY
The exact trope here is debatable since Heine is very obviously gynophobic thanks to his dead sister (ie: DOES NOT LIKE WOMEN) but since he's getting closer to Naoto, it could also be, IT'S NOT YOU IT'S MY ENEMIES since Heine has more than enough psych trauma in canon to justify that sort of trouble and that sort of response and reaction getting close to people he even likes. (The personality in his collar comments that Naoto is "cute", even. And see his partnership with Badou, who seems to comment rather casually that he thought Heine was gay for the longest time...)
Either way, he ends up as a CELIBATE HERO, and doesn't seem to care.
That said, if he had a sexuality, or even a romantic side, it would be straight. (See "HETEROSEXUAL LIFE PARTNERS")

In the end, as played here, it comes out to a matter of ease for a very peculiar mun who is herself asexual. Playing Heine as such is extremely comfortable to me, and possibly quite canon. As I play him, he's an Asexual BiRomantic.

AX CRAZY
During instances of BERSERK BUTTON collar-boosting, especially since it's more of an ENEMY WITHIN thing, only not entirely.
Heine will fight to put it off for a bit, of course, making it more of a SUPERPOWERED EVIL SIDE or even WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT INSANITY thing since pre-Berserk while he won't exactly PET THE DOG, he will stick out his tongue in a credible impression of a panting dog, and bark back at it.
Post-transformation, however, well...all those little puppies had better run, because it's DOG SHOOTING time, (Puns probably intended in this case.) complete with everyone's favorite SLASHER SMILE.

(MOG, the Watanuki-mun has remarked OOC "He always looks so happy when he's fighting, in the manga! ^^;;". She's absolutely right.)

BACKSTORY
It takes up chapters and chapters, and Heine's apparently the only one who actually remembers it fully.
Nonetheless, he doesn't share hardly any of it, except when Badou asks, because he likes to answer only literal, direct questions when he's feeling evasive.
(Possibly an indirect WHEN IT ALL BEGAN since just about every character seems to have some connection to it. Even Naoto's caretaker Fuyumine is set up as part of the same core group of assasins as "Herbst" and "Fruling" who work under Eizensturn--the scientist who created the Rammsteiner "soldier series "Heine belongs to.)

BAD@$$ ABNORMAL
Let's see...he regenerates from anything short of a head-wound or a complete amputation (which might just take time--it's uncertain), he has mild super-strength, crazy agility, occasionally goes axe crazy, and can gunfight.
Why do I need to elaborate?

BAD@$$ LONGCOAT
Managed sleeveless, too. Also, Heine's entire wardrobe is kind of a sort of bondage slave's FETISH FUEL considering he has platform boots with spikes coming out of them that he uses to kick people in the face. "Step on me" has a different meaning here.
As a bonus he has COOL SHADES which he wears at night. (Justified to some extent because he's an albino, and has light sensitivity, but why would you need them at night?)

BERSERK BUTTON
Don't touch him. Don't come near him if you're a girl. It leads to FLASHBACK NIGHTMARES. He's got more triggers than anyone. Speaking of which? don't pull his gun triggers unless you're him unless you can a "kiss on the cheek" that involves you losing the cheek in the process.

BIG BROTHER INSTINCT
With Nill. Definitely with Nill. Actually she's described as the only woman he's okay with touching him. ~~Not like that. She's fourteen, and see ASEXUAL.~~ Possibly because she looks a bit like Lilly...? (See DEAD LITTLE SISTER) Heine might be a jerk to everyone else, but if you have a frilly dress for Nill, he might even smile for a moment thinking about how excited she'll be about it.
Of course he goes back to being a jerk to everyone else afterwards.

BIO AUGUMENTATION
That thing on his neck? Yeah. "You don't have one, do you?"

CAIN AND ABEL
With Giovanni, the only other remaining member of the Rammsteiner series.
In this case, Heine is the white sheep of the family so to speak (ha ha), for betraying their mutual creator. Unlike most pairs in this particular trope, Heine is the "older sibling" but also the good guy. Trouble is he was "the best" and Giovanni was the UNFAVORITE. Giovanni was the one who couldn't go into his berserker mode at all. Giovanni was the kid who Heine had the back of because he couldn't shoot a gun, or do anything for himself, and was scared to death of even leaving the underground to escape being an experiment. Giovanni also was particluarly close to and maybe even loved their "sister" Lilly, and Heine seemed to have picked him out as his chosen LANCER
Not so anymore.
Now Giovanni's the only one immune to headshots, and he's there trying to capture Heine, or maybe just have a little fun shooting at him for old time's sake. What's clear is he doesn't remember his past properly, and for that, he blames Heine for killing everyone, and for that, he's almsot constantly there, mocking and goading Heine, tormenting him in dreams, and in waking.
Heine for his part, though possessing no qualms about shooting Giovanni in the head, seems to regret it, or at least feel something towards his "little brother" in that he adds quietly, "Rest in peace, Giovanni" even after eh beleives he's killed him.
Either way, can we say, RECURRING VILLAIN?

DARK AND TROUBLED PAST
Heine epitomizes this. There are huge chapters end on end about this. In short? If you have a cerberus spine attached to the back of your neck, your childhood is ruined and full of fighting things to survive.

DEAD LITTLE SISTER
Heine's sister Lilly, who incidentally was a bit too good at losing herself to her collar. Enough so that it turns out Heine's actually rather stable in comparison. (Lilly is completely developed as a POSTUHUMOUS CHARACTER through flashbacks.)
Nill's a bit of a REPLACEMENT GOLDFISH to Heine in this regard, only he doesn't treat her like Lilly, he just treats her a bit like a sister.
Heine's problems with women are completely oriented around killing Lilly, though, leading to some possibility of MOURNING AFTER applying as a trope. Albeit, most people under said trope don't rip their dead little sisters in half with their bare hands and wake up to find out what they've done.

DOES NOT LIKE WOMEN
It's Gynophobia, technically.
He's actually scared of them. Enough so that a waitress passing too close by with his coffee can send him scooting back across the seat and into whoever's next to him. And touching him, God forbid, is enough to send him into an actual fit, with face-veins and foam.
Unlike most people in this trope however, Heine is portrayed pretty sympathetically. His fear of women comes from killing Lilly. Actually, it's more that he's afraid of killing them, and can't let himself close, rather than being a case of simple misogyny, or a case of comedy!gay.
As mentioned before, if Heine were to get past his ASEXUALITY and his paranoia relating to what he is, evidence points towards him being straight. (Particularly in regards to Naoto.)
Then again, Heine has enough trouble getting close to anybody.

EVIL ALBINO / HEROIC ALBINO
Self explanatory, I think. The evil/heroic tradeoff depends on how much of his collar comes into play. Saving prostitutes at random, however, smacks of hero. (Nill, if you're wondering. Yes, she's fourteen. She's also an "angel" fetish mod designed for a single purpose, and Heine identifies with being created for just one thing. ~~Again, DOGS is an M-rated manga.~~)

On the subject of the "albino hitman" comment under EVIL ALBINO, Heine is hardly a sharpshooter in his canon in any event unless he closes with you, and I try to work in light sensitivity and degraded eyesight for him as much as possible to compensate. His aim isn't horrible, but it's not spectacular in canon. He also dual-weilds, though. (GUNS AKIMBO)

GRATUITOUS ENGLISH
"F*** up, gentlemen!" among others, proving Heine is just as charming in multiple languages.

In hometrail this is absolutely moot since there's universal translation running.

HETEROSEXUAL LIFE PARTNERS
Well. Asexual for Heine. We're not sure about Badou. But Heine and Badou do hang out an awful lot, and they are work-partners, not to mention they get scads of fanfiction. Even Naoto gives them meaningful looks.
Caring for someone is clearly what you show when you plant your boot in their face to keep them from getting hurt in a regenerating gun battle. (See "VITRIOLIC BEST BUDS")
Badou claims, "I'm only gonna say it once. We're not like that."

HIDDEN DEPTHS / CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Nice enough to be noted even on the TV tropes main page for the series. In Heine's case, developing enough to be alright with Nill, and have serious tension and grudging, growing trust with Naoto, etc. Mostly his things about women seem to be changing. (He's softening just a little.)

IMPOSSIBLY COOL CLOTHES / IMPROBABLE WEAPONS USER
Totally subverted on the first because while Heine's wardrobe is pretty cool, it tends to only last for one gunfight before it has to be taken home for Nill to painfully try to repair. (Without much success because it turns out Badou's the one who's impressively domestic when it comes to fixing buttons.) And the "improbable weapon" doesn't refer to his guns, which are rather normal, and even need to be visably reloaded, but rather, the chain on his mauser, which he uses to trip attack opponants, break necks, grapple arms, etc.

In hometrail the chain comes in handy for disabling vampires if you need them to hold still while you shine their faces off. Not that Heine didn't get confused for one a few times, and get kicked out of the city, first.

KUUDERE
Kind of.
He fits for Type 1, anyway. (This is definitely open to interpretation, I'd say...)

LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER
Well. Brother. Pretty much on anyone else with a cerberus spine. (Ie: Luki, Noki, Giovanni, etc.) Not for nothing is one of Heine's interests on his interests page related to this.

MARK OF THE BEAST
A pun in this case. Everyone in the family seems to wear matching collars. (Or not as matching in one case.) It confers as mentioned above in several places, NIGH INVULNERABILITY, and/or being practically IMMUNE TO BULLETS. (Or knives!)

ONLY MOSTLY DEAD
Hand in hand with that last bit. In the original DOGS (seen as a prequel or starter) Heine gets shot out of a window, then gets up, regenerates, walks back to Bishop's church where he changes his shirt, grabs Badou by the hair and proceeds to take down a brothel full of mafia men with his nicotiene deprived partner.
In DOGS: Bullets and Carnage, Giovanni's prime entrance involves shooting Heine eight or nine times point blank with pauses just to see how close he can push him to death. Heine actually briefly appears inside a formless void, talks to his "dog", then comes back to himself and proceeds to have a huge gun-battle with Giovanni.
In this case, the difference between this and All-dead is a headshot.

In hometrail one has to wonder if even that would keep him down for long, since it didn't for Arthur (specificities), who's otherwise normal.

ORPHANAGE OF FEAR
Not orphans, test-tube babies, apparently, but you get the point. Everyone with a cerberus spine starts out somewhere. (See "DARK AND TROUBLED PAST")
...For the record, Einsturzen is not "gaunt and dour", she's downright voluptuous, but she's also completely nuts.
WHERE I WAS BORN AND RAZED applies in Heine's case. Except Giovanni says he didn't do a good enough job of it and therefore the ROARING RAMPAGE OF REVENGE needs to be worked on a bit for the second act. Assuming Heine can ever find the entrance to the underground ever again. (LASER GUIDED AMNESIA sucks.)

POWER TRIO
Heine, Badou, and Naoto.
Heine thinks it should still be a duo because this group doesn't need sword-toting chicks who keep stalking him for information and demanding stuff. (No matter what his collar thinks.)
Character Development says otherwise.

SPELL MY NAME WITH AN S
Earlier fan-translations made Heine's name "Haine". Official translation goes with "Heine" which is apparently short for "Heinrich" in some German countries, but I wouldn't ask him if I were you.

THEME NAMING
A little more obvious to people with the appropriate tastes in music, but "Rammsteiner" in Heine's name is taken from the german industrial band "Rammstein". Badou is Badou Nails in tribute to "Nine Inch Nails", and even Angelika Einsturzen, Heine's creepy doctor/creator is named after "Einsturzende Neubauten".

~~In a further tip of the hat to this, all of Heine's Prose-Log cut texts have been Rammstein Lyrics so far.~~

TYKEBOMB
Possibly for young!Heine plus cerberus spine. (Or for anyone young with that kind of hardware strapped to their neck.)

UNSTOPPABLE RAGE
Moreso than most characters under the trope because unlike them, Heine doesn't stop just because you hurt him or kill him unless it's a head shot.
~~Put him in a room with Wolverine. You'll have one heck of a party.~~
This is also a subset of his BERSERKER battle-style.

VITRIOLIC BEST BUDS
Heine and Badou, and definitely type 2. During battle there's a definite back and forth. Largely it's more on Heine's side than on Badou's since snarking Heine back would take up Badou's valuable whining time. Plus you see occasional breaks as one or the other loses sanity and the other's forced to take over being ~~the straight man~~ the sane guy.
On Heine's end this involves snarking Badou's whining every chance he gets, trolling him, but also rescuing him every time he's in danger. (Though this doesn't stop Heine from kicking him in the face post-rescue, grumbling "Why is it always something with you?")
Heine will also kick him in the face to keep Badou from getting blasted to smithereens by gun-toting psychotic regenerating twins.
They epitomize this, but at the same time, they manage to have moments of genuine non-snarking discussion where they carefully skirt around topics of importance and banter about how the rest of the world is full of morons, too. So they are legitimately close, albeit in a genuinely male dynamic.

At hometrail Allen Walker seems to privately think of this particular dynamic as "Lavi and Kanda, only more married".

WHILE ROME BURNS
See Heine's profile page:
Heine: There's something peaceful about this...getting the guys together and sliging some lead around...
Badou: Would you please explain to me what the Hell is peaceful about this?
Being a battle-raised violent mostly-immortal person seems to have its perks.
Also: getting captured by the mafia and turning down joining them because it "seems like it'd be a real pain".

If Badou is in a nicoteine-deprived fit, this can overlap into DISSONANT SERENITY

This attitude also attributes to some/all of Heine's intentional or unintentional trolling at hometrail.

WHITE HAIRED PRETTY BOY
Ehhhhhhh.
Might be. ~~I have difficulty telling.~~ There seems to be some manga-reaction as though he might be given that one mafia boss who adds that he's his type and why doesn't he think about joining them.
Magato also seems to immediately assume Heine is Naoto's boyfriend (while Heine simultaneously assumes Magato is Naoto's boyfriend, which is probably a Freudian Slip with Garters. ~~That's my phrase for it, anyway.~~)

Contact & Itchy Trigger Fingers

2011-01-30T02:52:18Z

player info.
name/handle: Skunky. Skuun. Sku. "Thumbs". ~~Or whatever I'm called. Honorifics as you like.~~
contact info:
Gmail: “Obsol337vulture”
Yahoo: "sweet_jumpin_jillybeans"
skype: “paradise.flossed”

Email or IM-ing is fine, or PM this journal or my personal one--whatever you’re most comfortable with. ^^
(My Yahoo account is the best way to get in touch. I'm practically never on the others. Once every few months at best. They're listed here so if that's your main means of finding me, I can switch to it for your convenience. If you jsut want to run into me, though, there's little chance you'll see me on Gmail or Skype.)

personal journal: obseletevulture
Oh...uhm... I'm running off Eastern Time, if the rest of you aren't. (GMT -5.00) But yes, I am on at pretty weird times. Mostly evenings, and early mornings for now. (Sorry.)

ALSO: If you have any trouble with me, PM me, or do an HMD scathing/loving critique here or wherever. (PM might be better since invariably some furniture company or youtube troll takes my journals and uses it as their linking appendage. Most vexing.)

Hometrail App [VS: 1.0] (12-4-10 version)

2010-12-02T20:54:19Z

character info.
character name: Heine Rammsteiner
canon & medium: The Manga DOGS and its continuation DOGS: Bullets and Carnage (There's also an anime OVA that covers the events of DOGS as the proverbial chapter zero, but it's exactly the same from what I can see except for being colorful, and rather relaxed in terms of action in the animation, so eh. Manga preferred by far.)
age & species: Mm...Anywhere from late teens to early/mid-twenties I'd say? Hard to tell. Nobody knows since Heine himself has amnesia in places, and probably doesn't know his own age with any precision. (More on that below in History) And he's Human. Well...sort of. Heavily experimented-on human. Ask him his age, or his species and he'll give you different answers in a bored voice with the undercurrent: serves you right it's none of your business. Bring up Brave New World and he'll probably stick the muzzle of his Mauser in one of your kidneys and let that give you an answer. ~~Our boy is s a kicker...~~

appearance:
You can always tell, because in any comparison he's "the pale one".
Not for nothing does he get tired of getting called "White Hair".
But he's cuddly and good-tempered as long as you don't call him names~

True-blue albino "young urban guy" type with too many earrings, sunglasses at night, neck-bandages, and a taste for bad leather coats and fetishwear-looking stuff covered in spikes. ~~Killer platform boots~~~ He tends to run through a lot of different clothes, because they get shot full of holes, but his things tend to be more durable and "tough" than flimsy.
Unlike the ten billion other anime characters with white hair, Heine actually is an albino, saving lots of unoriginal fans a lot of the senseless questioning that always seems to occur whenever some man (who usually looks like a woman) shows up with his anime bleach job. Heine's definitely unusual-looking, and yes, has red eyes, but they're legitimate red eyes for once.
Without the neck-bandage, he has a pretty nasty-looking contraption actually bolted into his neck which would definitely be something to comment on if you're someone not into losing your lunch. You try to sneak a peek, and you might lose that other kidney to a friendly Luger.
There's a scar stretching down Heine's spine about mid-back, going past his hairline stopping about level with his earlobes in the back. It's the only one he'll ever keep, and it goes under that bolt in the back. If you look real hard at the back of his head, you might notice the scar going up and through, because he can't bandage himself like a mummy. Mostly the bandages are there to hide the collar, not the scar.

Here. Have a neck-shot and some naked people. (G'darnit Badou.)

Also, there's a sort of uhm...waist-up naked shot for the original DOGS book "0" (because hey, it's M-rated anyway. Sorry, but I'm not putting it up because Naoto's distracting with her chest-scar and...well...chest.) That shot makes clear that Heine's about 172 cm tall. That's just under 5'8" even if his hair might give him another inch or two. So he's not that big of a guy. He just has an attitude. Since a lot of people go on toughness based on size at least in part, that might be good to know.

timeline: I'm taking him from just after Campanella Fruhling and the "pack of dogs" attack the underground, and just before they atack other portions of the city. It's after Naoto and Heine meet, after Giovanni does mysterious stuff, and more or less while Badou goes off for his "night at the opera", and Bishop makes things complicated by revealing things just enough to be confusing. Just after/in about book four. ~~It's hard to find scans now, okay? And we're only out to book four here in America. >/////<~~ So he's a fairly "early" Heine by most fandom standards. ~~Fun, fun.~~
(He's in the exact same timeline as Badou due to epic coordination, actually.)

Plans for while on the caravan:
Blow stuff up. Sleep. Actually get some time to relax. (Which he has a different definition of than most...) Totally out-troll Church for everyone else's sake? *shot*
...To be honest, I sort of want to play someone other than Gau all the time here. Hometrail's like the Canterbury Tales of LJ and it's great here, surrounded by fun events and skilled people who genuinely like their characters. But playing someone as...hands-on as Gau runs me kind of ragged with his high energy and brick wall-ness. (I'm very much not type A and he is. Plus I'm disorganized and kind of secretly shy and he's very much not.) Not to mention there's the fact his lack of a sense of humor always makes me somehow need to make snarky narrative commentary in my prose logs which probably gets tiring for everyone else after a while. Gau's not really designed to be approached seriously, and has a lot of action-related comedy to his position, but situational comedy is less my thing than irony and wordplay.
I've debated and turned over the idea of playing DOGS characters literally for years, and Heine's been voice-testing really well. He'd be fun here. I like him. And while he's not the strategic fit Gau is, he'd mingle more roughly which would be nice too. And the poor puppy always gets put in all these post-apocalyptic places... So while I'll probably end up putting Heine someplace no matter what, this is really my first choice for him out of anything.
The fact that another version of him was here in the past, and Nill was there would be interesting to explore. ~~I think you guys even had Badou for a bit.~~
Ooh. Ooh.
And we could have target practice on the caravan. With a live target. ~~Church could learn to actually hit something.~~ And superheroes!
Also? Blowing stuff up.
Plus I want to see people try to get Heine out of his shell without getting shot. (Or at least seriously cussed out in monotone.) Because I take a sort of grim, sadistic pleasure in that kind of thing.
Just general interesting antisocial CR? And vacation for sick puppies. ^^;; He's not a bad fit here, he's just not "perfect" the way Gau is for this setting, and I kind of want that.

history+link

Have a jellyfish, Eblis O'Shaugnessy

And to supplement in my own words on the interrelation of history and setting:

The world of DOGS is definitely post-apocalyptic sci-fi, what with references to a "climate disaster" (followed up with "You know this planet used to have four seasons?") and definite evidence of "genetic technology running wild." That aside, it seems to mostly revolve around an environment which includes subterranean mad-scientists, genetic fetish mutants, and petty mafiosi, with every man woman and child slinging a gun, a sword, or at least a set of adorably petite flightless wings. Heine himself is a collared and tagged experiment after a fashion, "built as a weapon" in the midst of all that with said feel of lapsed technology and disaster as (debatably) the most sci-fi-afflicted member of the main cast.

Much of his history is implied. For starters, Heine has selective amnesia for bits of his past. He doesn't remember anything before waking up in a dark room, wandering out, and seeing a bunch of other children with collars around their necks just like him, immediately thrown into a life as a living weapon after, slave to the "Spine of Cerberus" (Also translated "Spine of Kerabos") a fragment of which seems to have been embedded in his own spine, producing regeneration even from death itself. I'd say he could be anywhere from ten to thirteen at the starting point, maybe older, but the exact timing is still fairly fuzzy, and the purpose undeniably twisted.

Through the tales of other characters, there's record of a past mass disappearance of children in the area, giving a potential clue to Heine's pre-lab origins. Heine also feels kinship to the far younger, mute, winged fetish-mutant Nill, claiming "she's just like me, a thing created for someone else's desire." Even this statement is inconclusive however since there are a number of indefinite possibilities: that the children within the labs may have been genetically altered "in utero" in the loosest sense fertilized in test tubes or the like. (Glimpses of row on rows of "babies in jars", etc.) All in all, it's difficult to pinpoint Heine's exact origin from this point in canon with so many possibilities around. And as an experiment, and an "altered thing" if not an entirely artificial existence, having amnesia-blots in his memory is something Heine seems, if not comfortable with, then at least resigned to. Even if he is born naturally, his existance has a very artificial, "created" feel.

What we do know about him from his personality (excuse the overlap) is that his serious jumpiness around women stems from killing his sister in a particularly nasty way in this largely implied past. It's implied Heine was pitted finally against his fellow "experiments" after an undefined period and was the victor, outright killing his sister Lily. (The picture shown so far is of half a girl embracing him, torn in two, with only poor Heine's numbly horrified face visible, loosely holding her.) He's "thought" on at least one occasion of it as a nightmare where he lost control and punched his hands right through her. ~~DOGS is M-rated for a reason. It's pretty violent.~~

On this note, Giovanni--one of Heine's fellow "Dogs"--mentions that Heine not only won against every other experiment (including Giovanni himself) but also killed all their "teachers". Though Giovanni, and their mutual "creator" (or perhaps "Engineer" is a better term) Doctor Angelika Einsturzen seem to be acting anyway possibly leading more weight to the theory of the experimental children being "home grown" or perhaps even cloned repeatedly if you want to speculate a step further. Giovanni battles with Heine while mafia-thugs get caught up in the background between two regenerating psychopaths... Heine refuses to follow Giovanni back into the underground, and...

After that refusal, and after discovering his blind "caretaker" the lolita-happy priest known as "Bishop" seems to have an earlier version of the Cerberus-spine collar, identifying himself as "Ernst Rammsteiner, the first failed experiment" with the casually added, "I guess I should call you 'brother'...but you'd hate that, wouldn't you?", a train barrels out from the underground spewing monstrous troops in dogs-masks with matching katana out into the populace, and Heine rather reluctantly battles them, instructing others in how to kill the regenerating "troops"--troops that are created, or perhaps more appropriately "manufactured" the same way he is.

At the point he's taken from, the train's directors' modus operandi is yet unknown and Heine's tag-team partner Badou Nails is off investigating. Heine's private thoughts on the subject likewise aren't yet made known to readers in the selective omniscience of the story format, though the regeneration of the "troops" makes clear that they have something to do with Einsturzen, and, indirectly, Heine too, as the proverbial "escaped experiment". Where he fits in is a mystery, but it's certain he does fit in no matter how badly.

Personality:
Extremely long as ever. *sigh*

There's some element of cultivated external "badassery" at work here if that's a term I can use in a proper sense. In the proverbial young, rebellious "eff you and the horse you rode in on" sense that talks gutter-trash, lives in the big bad city, and sometimes gets involved with sundries and comes out on top due to being just that badass. It's the larger-than-life gunslinger, the urban mafiosa thug, and the shell-shocked soldier rolled all into one, coated in a light veneer of "coolness". He's that gloomy, grim, black-leather-wearing pale guy who walks out at night, sees pimps after their runaway prostitutes and shrugs to himself in a cool-headed gravel monotone that he can't get involved in every single little thing in a fallen, gritty world. It's bleak, monochrome, and with a touch of proper noir, and maybe a splash of blood here and there. In the end it's either unbelievably cheesy, or the very letter and note of cool.

Certain genre-saviness might be partly responsible for the leather-shell, but there it's unsurprising that Heine would identify partially in larger-than-life fictional archetypes--it's hard for him to be only human when you're debatably immortal and made to fill a role bigger than life, and his like is found in fiction more readily than in "reality" even as defined within his world. It is, indeed, a shell, even then.

Underneath the Noir-Emulation, Heine's strung out pretty tightly between the invariable backlash from the sheer volume of nasty in his past, and keeping his proverbial berserker switch off. His gynophobia (fear of women) is legendary enough--enough that even offering him coffee in a way that catches him off-guard will make him jump back like you're something dangerous, and touching him (God forbid) is enough to send him into a full-out head-grabbing fit to control himself while veins bulge in his throat and he has a literal fit, flashing back to memories of his dead sister, Lily. He just can't imulate a normal reaction to women except undeniable chilliness--more than his usual distance. And even that's an act of self defense. It's not that he doesn't like women, either (As Badou attempts to confirm on his end when trying to explain Heine and women to Naoto: "I'll say this once, we're not like that.") Heine doesn't like anyone with a few carefully grandfathered in exceptions. Badou's tolerated because he knows better to ask questions. Nill is literally unable to ask questions, and the only woman he'll get near, or even touch. Heine's world is them, Bishop, and that's it, and he doesn't care for it to be any other way. Even those three are a comprimise he'd prefer not to make: minor diversions on his driving path to find the underground he came from, and presumably destroy it.

Paradoxically in all the archetypical dragging are the mundane moments. He's the guy who stays up all night playing video games even though he's playing, not because he likes them, but because he can't sleep and doesn't want to dwell on much of anything. He has his tastes: old black and white movies, and pixilated first-person shooters... It's one thing to live your life being forged into a weapon, but another to live it in reality. There's a lot of space between, as he's learned over the years, and it needs to be taken up somehow, even if you don't have an interest in it. He's neither depressed nor content, but simply existing, waiting for the right scrap of information to lead him back, killing time like he kills everything else.

And so, in the many spaces between murder and mayhem, he comes off as apathetic. Or...perhaps just...waiting since if you give him just the right kick, you've opened up a can of Hell where giving a man what he calls "a kiss on the cheek" includes ripping said cheek clean off his face with nothing but his teeth, and screaming any dialogue necessary. (It usually isn't necessary aside from screaming the name of your opponant as you charge at them, guns blazing.) It's not his intent to be horrifying, though some aspects of him are. He grimly admits he sees himself as a monster, but there's no drama, or self-hatred to the statement. It's simply what he is. He's disgusted with the fact he's alive and others aren't, he admits to Nill, but it's likely due to what he's done to remain alive. On the hairline between accepting and submitting to his inner "dog" and those who would use him, self-desctructing in some misguided penance, or giving into his urges for violence for their own sake, Heine maintains control enough to stop at listless, gloomy introspection, and his fairly passionless attitude of waiting--killing time like he kills everything else.

For all that he plays up a "hair-trigger-about-to-snap" persona duality to those who actually do know about his reckless battle-style, and horrifying violent side, he still holds back. The violence is actually quite alienated from his "real" personality. Control is necessary to hold back the personality infused into him after all--and it is a separate personality indeed as it confronts Heine with a body like his own as he reaches the brink of death, asking to be let out, and refused time and time again. His violence is the weapon speaking through him, in a way. It's not to say he can't be set off and set off really badly, but for a situation to be bad enough for Heine to let himself go, and rely on that other personality is much more unusual than he'd let on: while he's quite messed up, he isn't stupid by any means, nor without conscience for all the methodical attempts made to deaden it in his brutal past. His collar, and the personality in it are the function he's "built" for, but they certainly don't control him. Attacking him, harming him, or particularly landing a blow and triggering an instance where he needs to regenerate, often trigger moments of brutal repayment, but they're single moments, solitary actions, and Heine himself surfaces soon after, blurring the lines

A sliver of that control in turn may be a latent spark of "goodness" or his aforementioned conscience. For all the times he'll let Badou get captured, beat up, and even mildly tortured, he never once actually lets his partner get seriously enough hurt to not lend him a hand in mopping up the situation. (Especially given Badou's own maniacally violent side when deprived of nicotine for long enough--usually about twenty minutes.) His self-speech about seeing pimps after runaway prostitutes and not being able to get involved in every single one implies that sometimes he does indeed get involved when it's not his business--as he does when rescuing Nill. And when Naoto feints, even Heine's legendary inability to even get near to women, while certain to make him step out of the way, can't actually let him allow her to drop the whole way and hurt herself. That little bit of him probably just makes the determination not to lose control that much stronger, stemming especially from his experience losing control absolutely and killing his sister Lily. And that little bit may inded be a mark of growing "softness" as he comes a little further out of the events of the past.

In short, his best kept secret is probably that Heine actually likes people. Some of them anyway, which is the same to him as liking people in general. He's got an undeniably interesting way of showing it, and sure doesn't think it's a good idea to try to show it outright, or in anything less than veiled, almost playful little moments of gravel-deadpan, but if he didn't like people he wouldn't have any qualms at all about letting them get hurt even though he'd rather everyone in the universe sit back and think of him as a monotone icecube.

There are exceptions to his apparent "hands-off" attitude, and demeanor, and there are things he jumps in for when he has no business doing so. It's something he's sort of privately irritated by: someplace in the recesses of killing machine, there's a beating heart that actually likes looking after Nill and making sure she has her frilly dresses. And there's part of him that likes listening to Badou whine about things in a satisfactorarily distracting manner even though he'll put on a show of retaliatory blunt insult and abuse. And there's a part of him still, which cares enough about what happens to those "like him" to protect them. Those parts don't really fit in with his "design", and he's aware of it in the most dimly, vaguely awkward way: it's too human. And he's still not sure what to make of it.

If anyone else ever points it out, or even insinuates it, they get a good solid psychopath glare at the least, and a tangible reasurance that he's still the badass character come to life, with a past Badou refers to dismissively as "like something out of a manga" and "one creepy-ass kindergarten".

Despite growing patches of humanity, Heine's abilities and past still alter his way of approaching others in some ways, just as he still has his collar physically still bolted into the back of his neck. Only ever remembering a body that can't be harmed, beaten, or blemished with anything short of a headshot gives Heine a sort of morbid fascination with the wounds of others in his own disconnected way. He's still fundamentally numb to violence and the concept of injury. Pain is "just pain" and that pain doesn't last. When he regenerates, granted, it hurts, but he has an inadvertent insensitivity to the cumulative continuousness of pain and its effect on other people. It's something he finds curious. And that curiosity is perhaps a better reason he lets the constantly-whining Badou get a little roughed up before wandering in to snatch him out of perpetual trouble for the umpteenth time: Badou of all people definitely lets you know when he's hurt, and more than killing people outright or regenerating, the slow healing process of wounds is interesting to Heine in a way that's neither sadistic nor masochistic, but almost innocent for all the fact that he truly doesn't understand it and has to approach it with the odd bluntness and distance of any other relational aspect.

That said, his sense of humor might also have something to do with how he treats Badou. Humor's just another bit of his growing humanity shining through more than anything: It's said humor is the mark of an interrupted defense mechanism, and Heine's nothing but defense and attack instincts.

Heine's humor is decidedly dry, particularly appreciative of irony and he certainly derives amusement from putting other people in situations. (Particularly certain loud, constantly whining chain smokers.)
--While Badou's trying to blame his injuries on his "deadbeat partner" and convince the occupants of the Buon Viggiano Italian Restaurant that he was playing things cool, Heine will walk in concurring sardonically that yes indeed, he looks very cool in these pictures, plopping down a half dozen shots of Badou screaming for mercy as he's taken captive.
--In the middle of a battlefield while Badou's trying to negotiate peace, Heine will sit there calmly, remarking on the peaceful air of men gathering together to shoot pellets of lead at eachother, making a suggestion for empathy-inducing movies. (He recommends Requiem for a Dream. It'll make you cry.)
--He'll literally cough up bullets and say he had some cheap candy stuck in his throat.
In short, he'll troll you into next week if he's in the right mood--in a subdued, murmured, sometimes snarkily grinning sort of way, with all the added fearlessness of someone who's immortal and doesn't have to worry about offending others, and even then, wouldn't care.
Expect him to unrepentantly shut you down, insult your attempts at being clever, and tell you what he thinks of your suggestion that he at any time take his orders from you. Any of the above is a sign he's in a good mood, even. It might not last long, but it happens frequently enough...until something reminds him of the past, and he goes dark. He's still got more triggers than a gun shop there for mood-dampeners, but he's also clearly had some time to work out what's hanging over him so he's not the total inhuman basket case he might have been, and he can function somewhat normally in society...by his world's standards anyway. ~~As long as strange women don't get too close to him.~~

Abilities:

Haah... Mods? I'll need to work out exactly how you'd like me to reduce this. Heine's personality kind of holds this stuff back a little, so...how you'd like to work that out...if the spine's just less effective then the "Awakened Cerberus" powers will be the things reduced, not the normal-state abilities since I don't know of Heine's exact potential modifications otherwise.

General abilities of all Cerberus-Spine-enhanced individuals are as follows. (Keep in mind that Heine supposedly has one of the highest if not highest peak snychro rates out of all Cerberus experiments.)

--Regenerative Ability
(Enough to heal bullet-holes and scratches, but not enough to regenerate limbs)
--Pathogen Resistance
(Not really elaborated on in the manga yet, but presumably resistance to biological weaponry/enhanced immune system.)
--Muscular and Skeletal strength.
(Obviously, he's tougher and stronger than most people considering he breaks through handcuffs with his bare hands despite being kind of skinny.)
--Neural Activity in Unused Portions of the Brain (Possibly used by Giovanni as he communicates with Heine without being there by causing him to hallucinate/dream, but possibly also referring to the spine incorporated into the brain stem, etc, or...other things. It's unclear, but I prefer to think his brain is being used for "reception" and commands and input from those running the Cerberus experiment.)

The speed of use in these abilities seems tied to just how much control he's given over to the Cerberus personality.
If something manages to neutralize his spine abilities entirely, given Heine's synchronization, he likely has a very low rejection reaction to substances in his body, perhaps even a fairly weak immune system in addition to all his current troubles with being an albino. (His eyesight's not great, he hates the sun, and he's totally noticeable.)

That said, in his normal state:

--Some basic Hand-to-Hand
(Heine seems to know enough basic bodily maneuvering to drop kick someone in the head, or kick them in the face. Though I can't really put my finger on if it's a specific style or not. Sorry.)
--He can gun-fight, and gun-fight well.
(He's not scrupulously accurate or anything, but that's to be expected since he doesn't have to survive on accuracy alone when he can depend on:
* The fact that at all times, when sustaining a wound, or even a killing blow anywhere other than the head, Heine regenerates. His clothes aren't so lucky, though. ~~Uwah. He really is a troll.~~ (Note: regeneration rate varies. See below.)
* The fact that he's pretty fast and dexterous even usually considering he totally does Matrix-style jumps off walls and/or breaks down doors by riding them down like increasingly-more bullet-laden skateboards.
Oh, and he tends to use two guns when he fights, so...that takes a bit more skill from the start. Possible ambidexterity.)

In the state of awakened Cerberus,
Heine can draw on some increased abilities below, at risk (Think Rage!Powers):

--Mild Super-Strength
(As above, only moreso. Enough to break open handcuffs or tear open flesh with his bare hands. At his worst, it's apparently enough to tear someone in half, bones, sinews, muscles and all, considering it's implied he did so to his sister.)
--Heightened Endurance
(How he got that close to the surface from that deep underground hasn't been really satisfactorily explained, but he keeps up with Badou on a regular basis, and Badou can run pretty fast if nothing else... Plus he routinely goes through gun-battles that span chapters and chapters and chapters. He's not one to be daunted by drawn-out battle.)
--FASTER Regeneration
(His synch rate goes up is the best way to explain it. If he's really holding back he seems to regenerate more slowly, and he really doesn't seem to like being so synch'd in with his spine. It's almost instantaneous when he's really ramped up, even when you shoot him in vital spots or "kill" him.)

At the cost of: (In order of severity of lapse for the most part...)

--Increased Violence
(It's like a bear who decides to play with you and pats you, but ends up breaking your ribs. He can fight "gently" in that state and still do horrifying amounts of damage to the human body. He's used to fighting other things that regenerate after all... Instead of just killing you with a bullet, he might pull off your arms and legs to see what happens and sit there watching. Keep in mind that it's still Heine to some extent, and Heine has his own twisted "playful" side. That comes out in a really bad way in other words when this shows up.)
--Absolute Berserk Bloodlust
(It's been implied that when he reached what's presumably his absolute peak synch, the spine takes over and he mindlessly kills everyone--both friend and foe.)

He can have bits of either in increments, too, then regain control of himself--though not before he's done some damage, generally speaking.

Possessions:
--Two guns in holsters. (White Mauser C-96 with chain, and a Black Luger P08) With two extra magazine clips each. (A mauser apparently shoots ten rounds, and a luger shoots nine.)
--Clothes.
(White jacket, neck!bandages, his ~~ten billion~~ seven silver earrings (six rings, one stud), leather gloves, rings underneath (One's shaped like an animal skull as near as I can tell. At least two rings.), pale gold sunglasses, white leather-coat-top thing, black undershirt, freaky buckle-pants, arse-kicker spiked platform-boots, belt, aforementioned gun-chain attached to the Mauser, spare clips, socks, undies of some sort or another... ~~Not touching what kind in specifics, thank you. Why don't you ask him, hm?~~ An arse-holster for both his guns. ~~How he sits, I have no idea~~. And a wristwatch that he deliberately sets forward with perfect deadpan to try to keep Badou more on time.)
--One rather nasty pocketknife
(~~The one he pulled on Giovanni during their first recent!fight in the series? Yeh. That one.~~)
--A pack of emergency cigarettes for Badou
(~~Stupid addict.~~)
--Wallet with a few bills in it, no identification, and two keys.
(One goes to his weapons-locker, the other goes to his appartment.)
--A roll of spare neck!bandages.

Samples

First-Person Sample:
Hopefully these will work. If not, I'll be glad to put in another. He doesn't say much. >_> The first gives an example of his interaction-style, the second, an example of his net-interaction, and posting style.
~~I'll warn he's got a gutter-mouth, too, though.~~

--Museboxing: in which Heine makes a fiery friend, and brushes off his little brother.
--Dear_mun: In which Heine makes comment on the musebox events, and considers appage.

Third Person Sample:

*cough* Uhh...Hi? I'm the Gau mun. So...you don't actually need one?
*JEDI MIND TRICKS*