Errare Application

[true_noir]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Latroma
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yes
CONTACT: latroma
CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Chloe
CANON: Noir
CANON REFERENCE: http://noir.wikia.com/wiki/Chloe (It's sparse, but it's the best there is.)
AGE: 21 (Was 17 at the time of entry into Amat Omnes and lived there for four years.)
GENDER: Female
APPEARANCE:
Images of Chloe at 16/17:
http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/mm180/AzureArcher/NoirChloe.jpg
http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t131/DarkMisao666/Noir/6.jpg

Four years older, I include a commissioned icon set of her 'aged' into her early to mid twenties. They can be found at the bottom of page 2 here: http://true-noir.dreamwidth.org/icons?page=2 However, because she has aged for so many years, it does seem appropriate to address any physical changes.

Chloe appears to be a short, athletic and flat-chested girl of mixed oriental and possibly Italian descent with purple hair cut short with a single pony tail, held in a regimented metal tube. She favors skin tight body suits or other utilitarian clothing that affords her absolute freedom of movement, along with a heavy-duty hunter green cloak that she uses to conceal an arsenal of knives on her person at all times. She has a pale, tanned complexion and piercing brown eyes. She is built like a gymnast and anyone who comes into physical contact with her will feel the muscles of someone who is in regular, regimented training. Her voice is tinny and almost always full of amusement.

PERSONALITY:
On the surface, Chloe is a playful, impish and curious soul with little to no respect for propriety and personal space. She openly admits with pride that she is an assassin, and not merely an assassin, but one of the most notorious assassins in the world, frequently with a giggle. She is not overtly violent under normal circumstances, so long as she is not on an assignment or threatened, preferring to simply joke with and tease those that she speaks to, her tinny voice always carrying a tiny amount of mockery in it, though one that is neither biting nor cruel under normal circumstances. She smiles often, exuberantly and warmly. She can be extremely friendly with a person, and despite her impish sense of humor is capable of being quite polite when the situation calls for it. Though she isn't partial to feminine clothing as a rule, she has always been seen with it in her wardrobe, a sign that when the situation calls for it, she can dress and behave as a 'proper lady,' and has the knowledge of etiquette to do so. Were it not for her overtly criminal activities and her fearless and prideful admission of such, she might seem like a slightly strange, perhaps a little creepy individual who is nevertheless generally friendly.

All of this surface appearance is both true, and at the same time a well-fabricated lie. In the sense that it reflects the playful approach that she takes with all things in her life that are not truly important to her, all of the above is absolutely true of Chloe. When she is not taking a situation seriously, it is fair to say that she is friendly, impish, playful and shows little sense of propriety towards other's comfort levels. She goes through life, taking little seriously, right up until the moment that she is 'on the job.' At this moment, her personality does not so much shift as it does reveal how little she truly lets people into her own private world. She does say that she is “The True Noir” when speaking with people, addressing almost anyone who speaks to her with this knowledge, even when it is not appropriate to do so. However, she does not allow others who she does not respect or is not loyal to to see anything beyond the playful smiles. The moment she is in the midst of a task that has been ordered by Altena or the Soldats with her permission, Chloe shows the determined, fearless, and fierce side. Smiles, laughter and taunts still happen, but only rarely. Her eyes take on a steely side and she moves like a dart through the field of combat, steel racing from her fingers, blood death and carnage in her wake. She is remorseless, killing without hesitation, breaking and entering without batting an eyelash and showing next to no respect for any individual nation's laws. The only thing that she understands is the ones who she owes loyalty towards, and the completion of her task with the unmatched and peerless perfection that only the “Noir,” a ceremonial title for two of the greatest assassins of their age, can. She shows an almost egotistical level of pride, informing targets such as a corrupted judge that Noir would be coming from them and when to expect them, as if telling them that their preparation does not matter, and their death is inevitable. They are merely a test of she and Kirika's abilities, worth nothing more. She views herself as an agent of death, constantly bringing up with those closer to her the almost religious devotion that she has to the cause of the Soldats.

Even this, however, is not the full picture of the person. To see her as an assassin is merely to see her in the professional capacity. Everyone within the Soldats save Altena and Kirika only ever see this side of her. At most, people in the world around who are not part of this world will only ever see the professional side of her. Even General Reimann, a former Soldats' asset she is tasked to liquidate and with whom she shares an evening and shows considerable respect, only ever sees the barest edges of her inner personality such as her love of flowers before he dies by her hands in a mercifully swift fashion. She does not allow people to get close to her who she does not care about, and in the entirety of the series she has only three people who truly get close to her at all: Altena, Kirika and to a significantly lesser degree Mireille. Only these three, the two other Noir candidates and her adoptive mother, ever see the full extent of her personality on any level.

Altena, High Priestess of the Soldats, serves as not only her handler but one of her primary tutors in everything but combat and also her adoptive mother. Chloe's loyalty to Altena is effectively absolute through the entire series, rarely if ever questioning the orders of the woman and viewing all that she says to be the word and will of the Soldats. She seeks constantly to earn her respect and her love, doting upon her, smiling at her like a young woman, embracing her, laughing warmly and telling her everything about her missions and personal relationships. Their relationship is of a loving daughter doing everything to acquire her mother's affection, and even the slightest praise is enough to make her smile and beam.

Kirika was Chloe's obsession, from the ripe age of 7, when she witnessed the younger girl's first assassination, of Mireille's parents in Corsica. She grew up near her until her late teens and idolized everything about the other assassin, viewing her to be the perfect example of what the True Noir was meant to be. Her idolization, as we see during the rites of purification when she kisses Kirika, carries with it a fully unrequited romantic component, but the obsession goes deeper than even just romantic interest. She stalked Kirika's actions, made herself at home in she and Mireille's home, effectively kidnapped her to bring her back to Altena for the ritual to ascend as Noir, threatened Mireille's life when she felt that the woman might get in the way of their relationship and did everything that she could to try and ensure that the perfect future in her mind of them together would play out exactly as she wanted. In the end, her possessiveness and her inability to accept that Kirika might care about anyone more than she and Altena cost her her life, when she goes into a jealous rage at Kirika's choosing of Mireille and tried to kill the blond assassin, dying as Kirika stabs her in the lung with a dessert fork.

For Chloe, there is no such thing as ethics, not in the traditional sense of a philosophically normative system of belief. She only understands loyalty. Ethical choices are abrogated and handed off to her mistress, Altena, who raised her from the earliest age to know only that she was a servant of death, a pseudo-religious figure whose soul was sold to damnation in order to purge the world of the evils that the Soldats' organization proclaimed needed to die. She does not allow her herself the luxury of questioning these judgments, but this should never be construed as her being incapable of critical and logical thought, or her being stupid. She has an excellent grasp of the liberal arts, quoting Lewis Carroll and other authors, and her education is thorough enough that she easily travels and passes through several European nations along with Taiwan, with the implication she has been trained to travel on her own, to survive for a time on her own, investigate marks, break and enter and grasp the political ramifications of her actions. In the end, none of these matter, because for her loyalty is absolute and she has been completely inculcated into the Soldats' movement. For this reason, perhaps one of the only true things that she values is her word. When she makes a promise, she seeks to follow through with it, such as when General Reimann asks her both to kill his East German rival for the death of his family and to spare his bodyguards, both of which she is willing to do. Even when threatened after his death by the lead bodyguard Chloe asks him to put his gun down, as she is unafraid of his skills, but would rather not break a promise to the deceased.

Chloe is elitist, almost to an extreme degree. She has a fascination for those who are skilled assassins, but only for those who actually merit her respect, such as Mireille, who she shows a begrudging respect towards at times. For ones like Shaoli, who she views as lessers, she holds nothing but contempt, revealing her occasionally very nasty personality. She has no time for thugs, soldiers or the like and shows absolutely no fear of death.

If anything could be described as a personal strength in her, it is the determination and fearlessness with which she takes on any task. She is not easily daunted, and is generally unperturbed by almost any odds that may be stacked against her. This fearlessness is not out of pure ego or unfounded skill, but rather a measured comprehension of her skill-set and well timed for ensuring success in her mission. She is bold, but she is not stupid. By the same token, however, her weaknesses can be seen in her utter lack of empathy towards her fellow man, complete lack of ethics or concern for people's personal space, possessions or the rule of law. She cares so little about another's home that she will walk right into their midst even when the day before they were nearly seeking to kill each other and make herself at home, taking their property and caring little about any of their possessions, showing a near complete disconnect about the needs or concerns of others. It is not that she cannot see. She does not care. Her obsession with Kirika and tendency to focus on a fascination that she has for truly deadly women can lead her to foolish choices, such as the one that costs her her life. Her blind loyalty, too, is an unfortunate and tragic flaw, as Altena is a broken, emotionally frayed woman of questionable sanity who does not have Chloe or anyone else's best interests truly in mind, her madness leading the cast on a path towards destruction.

POWERS/ABILITIES/MAJOR ITEMS:
-A CRAU Note: While Chloe was granted powers by the God Thanatos inAmat Omnes, I am head-canoning that these powers do not transfer beyond Thanatos' grasp. Only her canon abilities apply.

Chloe is, arguably, one of the five best assassins on the Earth at the time in her canon, trained from birth in the fields of human anatomy, martial arts, weapons training (with a heavy focus on knife work), gymnastics, linguistics, stealth operations, B&E and liberal arts. Her athleticism is at the very height of that of an olympic gymnast, as demonstrated numerous times while dodging hails of bullet-fire, performing acts on par with top-level parkour practitioners and various gymnastic feats throughout the series. She has been shown to throw knives at a distance of well over twenty to thirty feet, placing her physical strength at roughly the peak of her body type. During her time in Amat, she picked up a certain familiarity with psychological counseling of those grieving the dead, polythiestic religions (as a priestess of Thanatos) and seduction.

Whether or not Chloe's capacities as a killer enter into the supernatural is never clearly explained in the Noir Canon. There is implied a 'power' that “The Noir” are supposed to have. However, aside from the classic trope of standing in the middle of a gun-fire unnerved and taking no more than a grazing shot to the hair, we can only speculate. I interpret that the Noir is more 'powerful' by reputation and fear , and generally view Chloe to be at the peak of human conditioning as a killer, the best of the best, but nothing more than the best a human assassin can be.

It is safe to assume that, if she arrived with what was normally on her person, she has about twenty pounds of throwing knives on her person, a heavy cloak, black body suit and a personal communication device reminiscent of a smartphone.

HISTORY: Chloe, for one, is 21 years old at this time, which is a significant physical change from her time in Amat. Her life on the island of Amat was frought with regular, constant barrages of strange events forcing her into sexual relations with strangers, leading both to some questionably positive relationships such as the ones she had with Hermione Granger and Parsee Mizuhachi, and to a terrible habit that she developed early on. Already somewhat predatory by nature, she took this a step further and became a sexual predator for the better part of her first three years on the island, aggressively seeking out partnerships in what can at best be described as dubious-consenting incidents and frequently outright rape.

Coping with the fact that the goddess Atia placed collars on all of the trapped guests that would choke someone to death if they did not have sex regularly, Chloe turned to the goddess' brother, Thanatos the God of Death, to serve in memory of her time as a 'servant of death' in candidacy for the position of Noir. This left her collar's timer at a week, frequently less, meaning that she took on an almost hyper-sexual and aggressive attitude for years. Her aggression was focused as well on anyone who struggled against Atia, as the goddess (hated or not) was the only reason Chloe was still alive at that time, culminating partially in a public trial and hearing after she executed Faith Lehane for violating the sanctity of Thanatos' temple. Spending a year on the prison island Lethia, she began to slowly sober up from the precipice of violence and cruelty and seek out more regular psychological counseling.

It took years to come to terms with who and what she had become. When it finally happened, Chloe was filled with remorse the likes of which she was not accustomed to having. She had died countless times in the service of Thanatos and at the hands of Atia's siblings and their petty squabbles, frequently in graphic and gruesome fashion. She had done terrible things, and her adopted mother, Altena, would likely have not recognized the girl that she had once been. She had never been kind, and actually was quite possessive and cruel, but the type of sadism she'd expressed in the last three years was so far beyond what she had once been, that she desperately focused on counseling and an effort to curtail her behavior.

While, due to the strange and surreal events of her time and Atia's various whims, her success at managing to break the cycle of violence was at best mixed, Chloe experienced legitimate remorse and sought out those who she had wronged who were still around the island and offered whatever was possible to make amends. She was not entirely a changed woman, but she was infinitely more in control of herself now.

The primary differences between the Chloe who entered Amat, and the Chloe who left are a sense of real penitence and a bit of active perspective on her former life as an assassin, along with a great deal of internal trauma and remorse. She is world-weary and penitent of her worst vices, but by no means entirely reformed. While her memories of individual faces and names from Amat are fuzzy at best, she recognizes the wrongness of a great many things that she did in her time there, and views her continued existence as something of a penance. She has been denied the hell and oblivion that she had been promised in life, and so there must be some vague purpose. Hardly a good person, and still more than a bit of a twisted individual, she is no longer actively predatory. She will still actively look for people who are fun to play cat and mouse with in one form or another, but it is very much 'play' now, with strict rules. Without the collar on, this play is very likely not going to be sexual in nature unless it is with someone who she holds an active sexual relationship. Just being able to breathe freely, to know that she won't be forced into another's bed, has given her an urge to rest, to deal with her libido in more constructive fashions and to no longer be beholden to whims outside of her own mind.

One other change in the course of her time in Amat is an increasing willingness to open up to others and to accept help. Formerly in life, she could never be close to anyone but Kirika, Altena or possibly Mireille. Nobody from her world ever made an appearance in all the years that she was there. Partially because of the need to have sex with others so often and the forced closeness, and partially because of relationships that she developed there, she found a growing reason to be at least willing to have more than casual social acquaintances. A few, such as Hermione, Kyoko Mogami, Erika Karisawa, Parsee, Seta Souji and others, were deeply important in helping her to separate herself from the bad habits she developed. She has learned that occasionally there are threats in the world that are so far beyond her ability to handle them that she can't 'go it alone,' and begrudgingly accepted the need for others. Added to this, she has a moderate fear of large bodies of water, one stemming to incidents involving Poseidon's child, the Kraken. If she is ever sure that no such creature exists here, the concern will start to melt away quickly.

Special Note re: CRAU CR: Because Amat was a sex game, and Errare is not, I intend to offer an Opt-In, so long as the mods permit it. Unless a person opts-in to have Chloe remember CR with their character in another setting (and is 18+ if that CR was sexual), her memories of anyone from Amat will be vague enough not to recognize people she meets, remembering events only in general and close relationships as impressions, not names.

SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE:
Video
[The sight of a purple-haired woman lounging in the treehouse with a large piece of the local fruit hollowed out in front of her came into the feed, filled with water. She was looking out the window, her hands toying with a small throwing knife as she did so, her face screwed up in a small smirk. It's barely been a few hours since she reached the beach, and finding somewhere more comfortable to be had been high on her list of things to do.]

Such lovely quarters. Much better, I must say, though not choking is always a plus. [She sets the nife down and fingers her neck almost reflexively, smiling to herself.] Mmm, I can almost hear the confused cries already. Lost, marooned on some island in the middle of nowhere, away from our homes, unsure, desperate...

This should be amusing, but oh so tiring. [She sighed.] If any of you would like to just enjoy the sunset, call me. I know no more than you, so what's the hurry? [Really? She was just glad to be able to breathe. The flood of air in her lungs, the lack of a collar around her neck, it was such a wonderful thing. She didn't want to be bothered by all of the screaming. Hopefully someone here would have a bit more sense.]

LOG SAMPLE:
(Used, I believe, prompt 1 from the test drive for this.)

She had woken now an hour gone by and chosen not to stay on the beach. It wasn't that the beach was an unpleasant looking place. In fact, it was arguably one of the more hospitable parts of the island she'd found already, but she didn't feel like being exposed. It had taken her about five seconds to verify that the collar wasn't still in place on her slender throat, an instinctive response after four years of being throttled by a mad goddess, and when it hadn't been but she hadn't recognized this place, the only possible explanation was that she'd been dragged to another of these strange places. What that meant, she had no clue, but being exposed alongside the waterline was about the last place anyone should have been with strange and surreal threats possible.

So, she had taken to the trees. Clambering up into the branches and out of sight in the midst of the technicolor wonderland, she could observe the others. She'd relax and be sociable in short order, once she was relatively certain that they were much like her. It wasn't that she was fearful, but a little healthy suspicion never hurt anyone and she had yet to find someone that she actually knew.

“Epta! Epta!” The sound came from overhead and she casually looked over her shoulder to see a brilliantly colored owl nearby. It was right about then that Chloe felt her ear twitch and reached up to scratch it. The owl looked friendly enough at least, but one could never be too sure with the oddities of a surrealist's painting serving as the world she now found it.

When Chloe scratched, though, there was a sensation of fur and the subsequent feeling of a tail swishing behind her. Her eyes narrowed and she sighed, laughing very softly to herself. She glanced at the black fur of her newfound tail and murmured ruefully. “A cat. Whoever you are, you turned me into a cat...” she murmured, shaking her head and the almost insane craving for milk she felt right about then before going back to people watching. “Well, it doesn't really matter. I bet this won't last any longer than her curses did, and it could be a lot worse. I could look like a lizard or something.” she smirked. She was pretty sure she'd seen a few catgirls before, and they could be kind of cute.

Well, there was no time like the present, if strangeness like this was already happening to them. She looked for the nearest confused soul with animal features and swung herself down off of the branch close by. Apparently, this world had decided she'd done enough people watching. She wasn't taking any chances either way. Landing lightly, she got to her feet and just smiled at them, tail swishing behind them. No words yet. She'd wait for their reactions first. It would say a lot about how to play this.