APPLICATION

Player Name/Handle: Zita
Plurk Handle: zitasaurusrex
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: —
Invited by: Korel

Character Name: Cayde-6
Fandom: Destiny
Character Journal: cachedout
CANON, AU, CRAU, or OC?: OU
Canon point: Destiny 2, Forsaken expansion, not long before he would've been killed.
PB: —

Setting Background:
Destiny is about semi-immortal people (Guardians) from the post-apocalyptic space future. All Guardians died long ago, but have been chosen by small space drones (Ghosts), resurrected without memories by a mysterious magic sky orb that made the drones (the Traveler) and given superpowers (the Light). They use this to protect what's left of humanity from aliens, monsters, and other forces of "the Darkness." They mostly do this with some absolutely buckwild space guns because the Traveler granted humanity high technology, and they kept some of it alive even after civilization collapsed and the Traveler fell silent.

Cayde is leader of the Hunters: Guardians skilled at surviving in the untamed wilds where they are tasked with scouting, exploring, putting down threats, and securing resources for the benefit of the Last City on Earth. They work alongside Titans (fighters who serve as bulwarks of strength, ensuring the City's walls are never breached) and Warlocks (wizards who use paracausal forces to incredible effect.) Each of these Guardian classes has a leader they call a Vanguard, and the three members of the Vanguard guide the Guardians to protect the Last City from a laundry list of weird, dangerous, but mostly shootable problems.

History:

• Cayde lived during the Golden Age of solar system civilization. He was doing mercenary work for a powerful megacorporation, Clovis Bray, and incurring deeper and deeper debts to them.


• Clovis Bray offered Cayde an opportunity to expunge his debt if he participated in their experimental Exomind program. Having your consciousness uploaded into a war robot was extreme, but he was in dire straits. Cayde leapt at the chance to get out of this hole and to do right by his wife and son. He didn't read the fine print.


• As an Exo, Cayde was trapped in a series of tours where he was mostly treated as equipment. Because Exos could be erratic, the corp would often wipe their memories to keep them stable. This was also used to ensure compliance, and Cayde began to permanently lose parts of his sense of self to wipes. Another Exo he knew kept journals so she could protect what mattered from wipes, and he began to do the same. He never saw his family again, but he would write to his son as a framing device. The corp wiped him six times in total: Cayde-6.


• The Collapse happened. The Darkness had hunted the Traveler to the solar system, and it laid waste to humanity. The Traveler fought the Darkness off, but it was badly damaged and left in a comatose state over Earth. The Traveler's final act was to create small flying drones called Ghosts, which it sent out to choose people to resurrect with the power of Light from among the innumerable dead. This created the Guardians, and Cayde was one such chosen dead. (His Ghost's name was Sundance.)


• Cayde worked as a Hunter. He ran with a crew of other Hunters, and Cayde was good at his job. He had friends he cared for very much. He had a grand, rough-and-tumble couple of centuries with plenty of opportunities to gamble, fight, and see the system's most dangerous and wonderful lost places.


• Resurrection by Sundance had wiped his memories again, but Cayde still had his journal entries. Through them, he had enough to put together some of who he was and his values. He started writing again, and seeking out other scraps of his past when he could. Much of his past is still lost to him and, even with some memories recovered, he only has some extremely distant, dreamlike fragments from his human life. They might be pure wishful thinking.


• While they were both more than a bit drunk, Cayde and his best friend, Andal Brask, made a bet to decided who would take up the then-vacant post of Hunter Vanguard. The previous Vanguard had been missing without a trace for a long time, and had left no sign of a Dare (the Vanguard Dare being a task left by a Hunter Vanguard to determine their successor, a Hunter tradition.) Per their bet, Cayde won his continued freedom and devil-may-care lifestyle by killing a notorious alien assassin (Taniks the Scarred) faster than Andal. Andal had to go be stuck doing leadership stuff. He was good at it, but Cayde missed him.


• Years later, Taniks murdered Andal Brask. Nobody was more shocked Taniks had survived than Cayde. Andal's Dare granted his post to whoever avenged him. Cayde, filled with grief and rage, hunted down Taniks and was left to take up his friend's mantle. (This is literal. The cloak he wears belonged to Andal, and is a symbol of this decision.)


• The role of Vanguard doesn't suit Cayde, but he's had it for a while now and done his best. He hates being cooped up, and being stuck in the Guardians' Tower while others go into danger he can't protect them from when things go wrong? That's hard on him. He has weathered several potentially world-ending storms in his post, including alien gods trying to attack the Earth and the time an alien empire destroyed the Tower and captured the Traveler. (They fixed it.) His friendship with his fellow Vanguard (Ikora Rey, Warlock and current Best Friend; and Zavala, Titan and too-formal-but-decent boss) has helped him just as much as he has helped them by watching backs and wrangling Hunters.


• Most recently, one of Cayde's friends asked him to help her put down a riot and mass escape in a jail for powerful aliens. He was eager to sneak out and do some work, but this was a trap. His friend didn't know, but the jailbreak was orchestrated for several aliens Cayde had helped lock up. They wanted Cayde dead, their benefactor had plans for his death, and Cayde found himself outnumbered and outfought at the bottom of the prison. Sundance was killed by a sniper, his backup was too far away to reach him, and he knew he was going to die.
  
  Then, he was here.

Personality:
Cayde has lived long enough to know who he is, and has worked hard to make that someone he can like. By nature, Cayde's not the most charitable, patient, gentle, or wise person. His principles demand that he help those in need and find value in others, but they're an effort. He thrives in situations where he has to be underhanded and a bit ruthless. He's proud, stubborn, and irreverent. He loves having nice things, stashing away nice things, and getting a few nice things over on enemies. He lies easily, and loves to gamble. He's no stranger to vengeance, and he takes losses hard. He makes snap decisions and takes risks. It's often not easy for Cayde to put aside instincts and do the noble or even smart thing, but Cayde knows what he thinks being a good man is, and is trying to live up to it.

Despite this effort, Cayde doesn't actually brag about the goodness that matters. He enjoys showing off, admiration, and just reward for his glorious exploits as much as anybody, but the things he does to be generous or gentle and safeguard others from harm? Those, he's happy to let go unsung. Much of Cayde's bravado, sass, and vanity are real, but he also exaggerates them to hide his real feelings. It's better if no one knows he worries.

As a Hunter, Cayde sees himself as a first line of defense. His job is to scout ahead, to find and exploit enemy weakness, and to watch everyone's back. He's accustomed to working without much backup, and to having a lot of autonomy to act on his own judgment. He likes it that way. If Cayde is bouncy, chatty, and irreverent, it's a way to broadcast that he's fine, and that everyone can trust his judgment and focus on the task at hand. It's not just annoying to have people doubting him, it's also dangerous. Cayde can't always keep concerns hidden, he's too talkative and impulsive, but he mostly likes to keep fear and doubt away from those he thinks they'd rattle. This is especially true as Vanguard, where he has to be a leader and a mentor.

In addition to these reasons, Cayde is a private person who greatly prefers to keep his business to himself anyway. He isn't 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 feelings are safely hidden under that shell.

It doesn't help that many of Cayde's strongest feelings are based on scraps of past lives he can't remember, gleaned from his old writing. A lot of Cayde's convictions were handed down to him from selves he has lost. Those in particular are private. There's something sacred to him in keeping the secrets of those past Caydes. The journals are Cayde's most important source on who he was, and are the foundation of the self he's built. In addition to his principles, philosophies, and 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, and even though he can't remember Ace, he still addresses his journal entries to him. His Queen is even messier: Cayde doesn't even have her name left. His belief in the Queen, in the fact Ace's mother existed and considered him worth loving, 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 gets weird somehow. Cayde in particular is responsible for sending people out to do dangerous work that they may not come home from, and his guilt is deep when he can't guide them back in one piece, or when he screws up. He has to keep himself going however he can.

Part of his deficiency here is that 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 being a jerk, and he is astonishingly bad at figuring out what he means to the people around him. He would be surprised to learn how much his friends actually 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. For Cayde, being liked is just a fun bonus he gets sometimes. He knows his bad jokes, risk running, and impulsiveness can be frustrating. He doesn't realize how much of his real feelings slip out if you're looking for them, or how much some of his friends would miss him if he were gone.

Keeping people mostly out of his business works, but it leaves Cayde isolated. He's very resilient, but sometimes? He really isn't fine and could stand to be worried about. Opening up, however, would be very difficult for him after operating this way for so long. Cayde's a Hunter. He's used to having to get by on quick and dirty fixes anyway, and there's security in knowing how his own emotional kludge job works (or how he thinks it works.) He's not eager to set aside the bare comfort that gives him infavor of an unknown that isn't even a sure thing.

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

Canon Powers:

• The Light- Guardians have some abilities that are pretty much space magic, gifted to them by the Traveler.
  
  • Weaponized Light- Hunters can make temporary knives (usually for throwing) and grenades out of Light. Their more ordinary weapons also draw on a Guardian's Light, though the exact division between what's Light and what's physical components isn't clear.
  
  
  • Solar Light - Guardians can use three different "elements" of Light: Arc, Void, and Solar. (Which works out to electricity, gravity, and fire.) Cayde's proficient in all three, he had to be in order to teach them, but his primary focus is Solar. As a Hunter focused on Solar Light, his grenades and knives are a bright orange and bring bursts of flame. He also can pull a temporary handgun made of a surge of Solar Light, which Hunters call the golden gun. (It's why Solar Hunters are called Gunslingers.) He can only sustain it for about ten seconds.
    
    Hunters that use Arc Light can use electrical grenades (which Cayde has been shown to know how to do) and pull electrical long knives or staves, and Void Hunters have a bow that anchors and weakens enemies (which Cayde has described the experience of using.)
  
  
  • Strength, Speed, Agility- Cayde is strong and fast, at least as much as an ordinary person with great training and conditioning, but he's more fast than he is strong. He's a Hunter, not a Titan. These aren't quite into comic book levels, but are a notable edge.


• Gear - Cayde has a signature Solar pistol, the Ace of Spades, which is mostly just a really cool space gun that shoots Solar rounds that explode if they hit a target just right. When he actually has his own armor, he also has access to his armor's jump circuits that use his Light to let him change direction midair, and he'd have a Light-powered shield system that will eat a few heavy blows before it breaks and lets more through.


• Ghost - Cayde used to have a Ghost, Sundance. In addition to a variety of useful little tricks (fabricating items, linking him into transmat systems to teleport, communications, hacking stuff, etc,) Sundance was able to automatically repair damage to Cayde and "heal" him when he was wounded, and to revive him if he was killed. Unfortunately, he lost Sundance right before his pull point. It's worth mentioning because Cayde's accustomed to immortality and low consequences for injury, and he's going to be dealing with losing a major part of what made him fit for his dangerous work as well as grieving for a lost friend.


• Robot Stuff - Cayde's a war robot made out of metal and (in some places) synthetic muscle. His frame is harder-wearing than a human body and can obviously survive more punishment. The downside is that it can't "heal" naturally, and must be actively maintained. Additionally, Exos are designed to imitate many body processes because they're necessary for a human mind to remain sane in a robotic shell. Cayde can push himself beyond human limits to ignore needs like sleep, but it's very hard on him psychologically to exist like a machine rather than a man. His body breathes, feels pain, gets tired, can become intoxicated, and also does process things he eats as fuel (though he requires less than someone with a human body would.)

Power Selection: GUN Canon Powers (which include gun)

I'd like to keep Cayde's access to his Light abilities, but he's easy to nerf. I want to categorically limit him to Solar abilities, as they're the easiest for him to use, and it's pretty sensible to put limitations on how much Light he's able to use because... well, he really is very far from the Traveler right now. He's running on his own internal Light and doesn't even have a Ghost to help him. He recovers Light on his own with time, but more slowly than normally.

Cayde can make a limited number of grenades and tripmines out of Light, and these have too short of a lifespan for him to stockpile. He can also throw burning knives (they don't last long enough to use as a regular knife) that vanish once they've struck a target. These are very useful abilities, but will need to supplement more conventional means of fighting because he'll drain himself quickly if he does them more than a couple times in a given fight.

The golden gun is extremely cool, but mostly an emergency measure because it takes him a while to recover that much Light and uses up all he has. If something hits him hard enough while he's doing that, he'll also lose it and all the Light is wasted.

Cayde's access to his gear can be limited by Jorgmund, and I'm pretty much at "you tell me" if you want him to be able to have his armor functions (particularly shielding) or not. If not, it's easy to say he just doesn't have the juice for it.

He is also, of course, still a robot.

A note on his health: As stated before, Cayde doesn't heal on his own and doesn't have Sundance to maintain him now. He's a machine with a mind inside it, and while he knows a few things about how he fits together? He's a complex piece of work. Cayde is going to hate this very much, but he'll sometimes need assistance from someone who can take a stab at understanding and fixing him. Luckily, it seems there are going to be several characters in the game with skills he could fall back on if necessary (and I have some specific planned CR to address this.)

Non-Powered Abilities: Cayde is skilled in scouting, wilderness survival, trapping, shooting, brawling, knife fighting, mistrusting big corporations, improvising weapons, maintaining his gear, macguyvering simple useful things together out of scraps, stealth, sabotage, larceny, gambling, bullshitting, and dancing.

Setting/Suitability:

1. How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?
Cayde is going to be pretty royally pissed off about Jorgmund, but he's sly enough to avoid doing anything too stupid that will get him killed. He might initially do something stupid, but will stabilize into something sustainable. It will help that he'll end up feeling like the other new hires are a responsibility he needs to take care of, because they need his help. Jorgmund will likely figure out that even though Cayde himself can be unruly and difficult, he will be manipulable via threats to others.

2. What do you hope to do with your character long-term?
Longterm, he should do alright. He's going to get some time to chew over the fact that he is now a Guardian without a Ghost and what that means for his future, and the game is going to force him to work closely and honestly with people in a way he's not used to.

3. Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?
He has this in spades already and though he's not an amazing teacher, he's okay enough he can also share some of it.

4. If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?
Cayde's used to working with a lot of people who range from all too similar to drastically unlike himself, and he can get by even with people he can't stand if he has to.

5. Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?
I'd like to have him running a bunch of shit past the company's radar on the sly, stealing and hiding supplies and contraband around the rig in case of emergency or contingency plan. It'll be fun. He's also going to find all kinds of stupid little holes in Jorgmund's bureaucratic and literal machinery that he can take advantage of to make himself (and maybe people he likes, on the sly) slightly more comfortable.


SAMPLES

Network Sample:

[ The footage of Cayde's interview cuts in and out, with blatant gaps in the time stamps where the interviewer has had to argue with him, get him back on rails, and demonstrate that yes, Mr. Six, the nanochain is very effective. Cayde feels like he's being pranked somehow, not by anyone in particular but perhaps by the whole damn universe. He was prepared to be dead, not for this. To add insult to his still-evident injury from getting bashed around in the Prison of Elders, the polygraph contacts keeps peeling off and they've resorted to taping them to him. ]

[ Subtitles helpfully pop in to identify the questions he's supposed to be answering. ]

[ ARE YOU MORE OF A HUNTER OR A GATHERER? ]

Are you kidding?

[ Cayde might normally find being asked this pretty funny, but he's too tired and irritable to get any joy out of it right now. ]

It's right there in the job title. I'm a Hunter. But if you want to take the long view on that, it's both jobs. Just depends on whether what you're hunting for hunts back or not. Which part do I like more? That depends on how pissed off I am.

[ Do you think a leader should be feared or liked? ]

I'm getting a sense that I'm gonna really clash with the culture here. [ Someone is clearly having some kind of reaction off-camera, to judge by Cayde's raised brows. ] What? That's not enough of an answer for you? Fine. [ Cayde rolls his eyes. ] Fear's temporary, loyalty lasts, and seeing which way the wind is blowing here? Not inspiring great confidence about how long you all expect me to stick around.

[ What are three positive character traits you don't have? ]

Oh, this one's easy. [ Cayde cracks his knuckles, or at least the gesture is there. He winces, having jarred something, then counts off on his fingers. ] I'm not patient, I'm not polite, and I'm not nice. [ He leans back again, deadpanning: ] I'm sure this all comes as a big shock.

[ What is your least favorite thing about humanity? ]

I could give you a sarcastic answer that has to do with you, but I'm getting sick of this, so: It's the dickering around. About everything. All the time.

[ He places both hands palm down on the table. It's not a slap, but there's a little force behind it. ]

Sometimes, things need thought out. But once you decide something, do it. Time doesn't stop just cause you're unsure about what to do. Problems pile up on the first one while you hem and haw, and it only gets worse if you wait too long.

You can't take your best shot without pulling the damn trigger.

[ If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would that be? ]

[ Cayde pulls in a long breath, then lets it out. Thoughtful. He's been combative through this whole process, but Cayde's tired. This question hits somewhere just a bit personal, and it slows him down. ]

Home.

I don't think it means anything to you if I tell you more about it, and you know what? I don't care to. I spent a very long time wanting to be anyplace else in the universe, but right now... [ He shakes his head, and is silent for a moment. ]

[ He looks back at his interviewer, expression newly intense. ]

Are we done here? Can we be done? Because I know I sure as hell am.


Prose Sample: *fingerguns*

Additional info: I think that's just about everything.

Final questions: The players won't know what the mods are doing with these questions until sometime later.

1. Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?
Cayde thinks Jorgmund probably did it somehow, and he is quite willing to believe that they don't know how they did it and are lying through their teeth. That, or it's just some kind of random weirdness.

2. If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence has having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?
Cayde feels a little like the universe is punking him, but he doesn't have any strong feeling that something has an intent for him. If it does, he figures it's probably one he wouldn't understand.

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