An App

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“I've been called a lot of things, but so help me, 'polite' will never be one of them.”

( This is very much not done because I don't actually need it yet, and it direly needs edited )

HISTORY:

History, the tl;dr version: Cayde's got a complicated and weird history and not even he knows all of it. He's from the post-apocalyptic space future, and he's one of the three leaders of a bunch of semi-immortal people called guardians that defend the last city on Earth from alien threats. Deep in his past, he was a human person who got his brain uploaded into a robot body in an unethical scientific program. He has had his memory wiped at least six times (hence Cayde-6), and the only things he knows about his history are what he's pieced together from his old journals. Any clear memory of his life as a human being has been lost.

Cayde tries his best, but he hates being in a leadership role. He wants to be out there exploring and fighting, but he can't because he's important. So, sometimes he sneaks off.

Before he came here, he was doing that. Unfortunately for him, this time he was in over his head against a bunch of aliens that really hated him in particular. They trapped him, stripped him of his immortality, and were about to kill him when he got pulled for the game.

History, the long version: Cayde was, at some point, a human man that lived during humanity's future Golden Age. The Golden Age was a time of high technology and prosperity where humans explored, colonized, and thrived throughout the solar system. This was made possible through the gifts and protection of a mysterious entity called the Traveler, an enormous floating sphere that came to the solar system from unknown origins.

Cayde was doing what seems to have been some type of mercenary work for a powerful corporation, Clovis Bray, and was deep in debt to them. The corporation offered him a special opportunity: they would expunge his debt if he participated in its Exo project. Cayde agreed to have his consciousness uploaded into a robotic Exo body, believing that the heavy price and further time would be worth it once he was free to return to his family.

Instead, he found himself trapped in a cycle of work tours and periodic memory wipes to keep him stable and compliant. Cayde wasn't sure if this had been in the fine print, because (typical of him) he hadn't read it closely. Inspired by another Exo, he started keeping a journal in an effort to preserve memories between wipes (always addressing entries to his son, Ace).

Then, the Collapse happened. Very little is known about what it means, but a force called the Darkness (the opposition to the Traveler's Light) hunted the Traveler down and, as it attacked, brought about the near-extinction of humanity. The Traveler fought the Darkness off, but in doing so it was badly damaged and left in an apparently comatose state over Earth, its Light protecting only a small patch of the planet's surface.

The Traveler's final act was to create small flying drones called ghosts, which it sent out into the solar system. Each ghost would locate a dead person and resurrect them. These resurrected people would have no memory of who they were before, but they would be granted the ability to channel the Traveler's Light. With the power granted by the Traveler, they could fight back enemies of Earth and be revived by their ghosts if they should die again. These revived people came to be known as Guardians, protectors of the Last City built in the shadow of the Traveler, and thus protectors of most of what remains of humanity. New guardians are still being found centuries later.

It's uncertain when Cayde died in relation to the collapse, or how, but he was chosen by a ghost and revived later. Unlike most guardians, he could piece together some of his past from his journals. Though he had nothing left of them in his memory, he continued writing to Ace and using the idea of his son and a woman he'd loved as coping mechanisms.

As a guardian, Cayde became a hunter. Hunters are independent scouts with good survival skills, and the hunters worked hard to expand the City's knowledge of dark and forgotten places in the solar system. Cayde and the crew he ran with uncovered lost places, killed dangerous aliens, and left caches of their prizes throughout the system. Cayde was good at his job, he had friends he cared for very much, and all was going well until Cayde and his best friend Andal Brask took the Vanguard Dare.

The Vanguard are the three leaders of the Guardians: one each to represent the titans, the warlocks and the hunters. Hunters, given their eccentricities, choose a new Hunter Vanguard when necessary through what they call the Vanguard Dare. The Hunter Vanguard leaves behind a challenge when they die, and the hunter that completes it takes up the post.

The Hunter Vanguard had vanished without a trace for two years, but no one could find his Dare. Cayde and his friend Andal Brask, drunk at the time, challenged each other to kill a dangerous alien assassin, Taniks the Scarred. The winner got to stay a free hunter, the loser had to go be cooped up in the City as Vanguard. Cayde took Taniks down first, and thus Andal got a new job. While Cayde was initially glad to have "won" and gotten to keep up his low-responsibility lifestyle, he sorely missed Andal out in the wilds.

Then, Taniks the Scarred murdered Andal Brask. The alien had survived and come back for revenge.

We don't know exactly what Andal's Dare was, but it's likely it was vengeance. Cayde, filled with grief and anger, hunted Taniks down and killed him a second time. After that, Cayde became the Vanguard's new hunter.

The role doesn't totally suit Cayde, but he's done the best he can by it. Being cooped up in the tower in the City is hard on him. Instead of roaming out in the wilds, he's stuck directing people he can't protect when disaster strikes, and trying to mentor new guardians in how to hunter. Occasional escapes to sneak off and do work outside help, but aren't really enough for him.

Cayde has weathered several ridiculous, potentially world-ending storms in his post, including multiple alien gods trying to attack the Earth and the time an alien empire destroyed the tower, occupied the City, and captured the Traveler. (Cayde's plan was to steal a teleporter and use it to go shoot the alien leader directly in the face, but all he managed to do was get himself stuck in a teleporter loop. It was embarrassing.)

Most recently, one of Cayde's friends asked him to help her put down a riot and mass escape in the Prison of Elders, a jail for powerful aliens maintained by the secretive Awoken people. Unfortunately for Cayde, this was a trap. While his friend knew nothing of it, the jailbreak was orchestrated for several alien barons he'd helped hunt down and lock up. They wanted Cayde dead as revenge, their benefactor wanted to use his death to further a plan, and Cayde found himself outnumbered and outfought at the bottom of the prison. His ghost was killed by the sniper baron, and he had nothing left to do but look his last death right in the eyes.

Or at least, he did. Then, suddenly, he was here.

PERSONALITY:

When you've been around for a few centuries, you have the opportunity to get to know yourself very well. Cayde-6 has lived a long life full of weird problems, several different layers of amnesia, and a great deal of internal conflict, but he knows who he is and has worked hard to make that someone he can be proud of.

The thing is, Cayde's not the most charitable, patient, or generous person. He has principles that demand he help those in need and find things to value in others, even others who are quite unlike him and pretty annoying at times, but it's not something that comes effortlessly to him. Cayde takes to situations where he has to be practical, devious, and a bit ruthless like a fish to water. He's proud, stubborn, and irreverent. He loves having nice things, stashing away nice things where no one else can find them, and the thrill of getting a few nice things over on his enemies. He lies easily, loves to gamble, and has one hell of a poker face. He's no stranger to bloody-mindedness and vengeance. It's not always easy for Cayde to set aside his instincts and reflexive desires in favor of protecting others and doing the noble thing, and he doesn't always succeed. Still, Cayde wants to be a good man, he knows what being a good man means to him, and it's much more important than momentary satisfaction.

Critically, though, he doesn't actually take all that much public credit for it. Cayde loves to brag about his exploits, and he enjoys admiration and just reward as much as anybody, but the small things he does to be generous to others and safeguard them from harm? Those, he's happy to let go unnoticed. Much of Cayde's bravado, sass, and vanity are real, but they are also traits he exaggerates to prevent others from knowing how much real concern he feels and how hard he works.

As a hunter, Cayde sees himself as a first line of defense. His job is to scout ahead into danger or watch everyone else's back. He's accustomed to working alone, or in situations where he can't expect backup if things go wrong. Part of his sense of duty is in keeping others from worrying for him, because if they do? They're wasting time. Worrying about Cayde won't protect him, and he needs to face danger up close in order to protect his allies from it anyway. If Cayde is bouncy, chatty, and irreverent, it's a way to broadcast that he's okay, he's not afraid, and everyone can trust him to have their backs without having to think about it. Things are gonna work out. Cayde can't always keep real worry hidden, and sometimes his concerns are useful to point out, but if they're not? He'd mostly like to keep a lid on that.

This also ties into the simple fact Cayde is a private person who likes to keep his business to himself. Even if he didn't see it as a detriment to the work he's trying to do and the guardian he's trying to be, he wouldn't feel comfortable with someone seeing too many of his personal feelings. Cayde's someone you can be friendly with and talk to all the time, then one day realize that he's never actually let you know him. His fears, his doubts, and his old regrets are his. He plays deeper matters close to the chest and doesn't trust other people with them. He's Cayde-6, legendary gunslinger, Hunter Vanguard, lovable rogue and scoundrel, and personal fears and philosophies are safely hidden under that shell. It doesn't help that Cayde has built much of his sense of self on fragments of past lives he can't remember, gleaned from old journals of long-gone previous iterations. A lot of Cayde's internal conversations with himself are between the living man and words handed down by the dead. Those in particular are private, there's something sacred to him in keeping the secrets of those past Caydes.

Cayde's journals were how he protected himself from memory wipes. Even if he lost parts of his history, he could still be sure his most important principles and ideals would remain. At this point, he doesn't remember his human life firsthand at all beyond a very small number of confused, dreamlike recollections that don't always have context or make sense. Even the written scraps are faint and few. He has some memories from past wipes that have drifted back to him over time, but they're similarly hazy and he's not always sure what order they fit into. The journals are his most important primary source, and in some ways it can be said that Cayde raised himself as a person through them. In addition to his principles and a heap of self-advice, they also gave him his two most important coping mechanisms: Ace and his Queen. Ace is the name (or possibly nickname) of Cayde's son (or so he's 99% sure), and even though he has no surviving memories of who Ace was, he still addresses his journal entries to him. His Queen is even messier: Cayde can't even prove to himself that she was ever a real woman, presumably Ace's mother, but at this point he doesn't even care. The belief in her, in a person that once loved him, is what Cayde uses to hold himself together when he's at his worst. He knows it's weird, but anyone who lives long as a guardian has plenty of dark times and loses too many friends. Cayde in particular is in a job where he's responsible for sending people out to do dangerous work that they may not come back from, and he frequently feels a sense of guilt that he did not go himself. He has to keep himself going however he can.

Though Cayde understands himself and knows how to keep himself operational, he's not as good at picking up on the feelings of others. He can easily veer into insensitivity, and he is astonishingly bad at figuring out what he means to the people around him. It would come as a surprise if he were to learn how much his friends actually like and care about him. He holds them in very high regard, but doesn't expect it to be returned and is okay with that. Cayde doesn't need other people to like him, and it doesn't really motivate him. Which is fortunate because, while he can have a certain roguish charm, his bad jokes, risk running, and impulsiveness can be frustrating. For Cayde, being liked is just a fun bonus he gets sometimes.

Keeping people out makes some aspects of his life easier, but it also means Cayde is pretty isolated. He's very resilient and good at taking care of himself, but he's not perfect and sometimes? Cayde really isn't fine and could stand to be worried about. He's just operated like this for so long, it would take a lot of restructuring for him to change. And what if that didn't work? Cayde's a hunter, he's used to having to get by with whatever quick and dirty tools are at hand. He may well have been running on a weird emotional kludge job for decades now, but it's a fix he built himself out of the scraps, he knows how it works, and he's not actually eager to set aside the security it gives him.

Besides, if he doesn't miss something, that means he doesn't need it. Right?