application. mask or menace.

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Brooklyn
AGE: 28
JOURNAL: glaswen
IM / EMAIL: neverrryourmask @ aim
PLURK: neveryourmask
RETURNING: Sylar, Daenerys Targaryen

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Theodore "Teddy" Flood
CHARACTER AGE: Presents as a mid-30s adult man, and has been in existence for over 30 years.
SERIES: Westworld
CHRONOLOGY: Season one finale, mid-episode, just before his final reset.
CLASS: Hero.
HOUSING: RNG me.

BACKGROUND:

Set in a far flung future, mankind has achieved its full potential with extreme advances in modern medicine and other technologies, although watching Westworld, we're only exposed to a limited view of the outside world. The show takes place on the inside world of an amusement park called Westworld. In place of rollercoasters and petting zoos, however, the attraction lies in the life-like robots that populate an environment that emulates the wild west, full of adventure and excitement. These robots, also known as hosts, are not self-aware, to best simulate humanity, but are there at the service of the human guests that pay to visit Westworld. These hosts act as guides and features of interactive, immersive storylines, of similar construction of what you'd find in an open world video game like Skyrim. And much like Skyrim, if you get bored of the conventional storylines, you can just go on a murder spree (or a fucking spree) with no consequence to yourself.

No real consequence to the hosts, either, who at the end of the narrative loops they follow, either settle down for a good night's sleep and a memory reset, or, in the event of gory death, are cleaned up, reset, and put back out in rotation. Which is a fine fate for a machine, except that like any good robot story, the question of their consciousness arises. The series follows the self-awakenings of a few of the hosts as they grapple with their overwritten memories and the potential for dreaming of electric sheep, and Teddy brushes against this story too.

From here are spoilers for the series and the last episodes of season one.

The show doesn't roll out information and events chronologically, but in rough order, here are Teddy's significant events:

He was an early host when the park was in development, and seemed to play some kind of lawman. When co-creator of the park Arnold decided to try and destroy the park, as he decided it would be too cruel to the hosts who, in his opinion, had consciousness or the potential for it, he uploaded a character narrative in Teddy's lover, Dolores, which compelled her to take on the persona of an as yet un-realised character named Wyatt, giving her the capability to kill all the hosts in the park. She compelled Teddy to help her, before killing Arnold, Teddy, and then herself.

This wasn't enough to cancel progress. The mess was cleaned up and put back on the track, and the park opened.

Teddy was given the role of bounty hunting gunslinger with a mysterious (unspecified) dark backstory, participating in conventional storylines to do with bounty hunting and other sundry sidequests, but more importantly, he was part of a narrative designed to keep Dolores in her story loop that generally ended with both of their deaths. (Find Dolores, have a romantic afternoon, return to her ranch, fight the bandits and/or guests there who have killed her family, and die.)

Thirty-five years of this pass by. Dolores starts to question her reality. Teddy doesn't follow suit.

In more recent events, Ford, the director of the park, uploaded a new narrative to Teddy to fill in his unspecified backstory. While still maintaining his current persona, Teddy additionally understands himself to be an ex-soldier who, while with the Union Army, witnessed his friend Wyatt go insane and slaughter a group of Union soldiers outposted at Escalante.

Consequently, Teddy becomes involved in a storyline in which he helps lead a party to hunt Wyatt down, and there, he and a guest confront the savage cultists that follow Wyatt. Teddy isn't killed, but maimed horribly and strung up to die.

A long time visitor of the park, known as the Man in Black, finds and recruits a dying Teddy in his journey to find the entrance of 'the maze', a motif he is occupied with that he believes relates to some deeper level of the game, tied to Wyatt and Teddy's knowledge of Wyatt. Teddy is compelled to go along with him when the Man in Black lies and says that Wyatt has taken Dolores. Along the way, Ford gives Teddy a line of code that restores his health.

Teddy starts remembering the Man in Black from prior resets, specifically a recent incident wherein the Man in Black killed him and dragged Dolores away, and suspects him of being involved in Dolores' capture.

During this confrontation, they are ambushed by Wyatt's followers, who may or may not be hosts who have died or been de-commissioned/retired. One of them expresses a desire to bring Teddy back into the fold, and kills him, but not before forcing Teddy to remember that he didn't gun down soldiers, but civilians. His recollections are mingled and confused with his overwritten memory of slaughtering the hosts with Dolores.

Teddy is reset back into his loop, recent memories erased, but, driven by mysterious reverie, goes looking for Dolores, who seems to be calling to him. He finds her in combat with the Man In Black, dying from a stab wound. He rescues her, bringing her to where "the mountains meet the sea", where she dies. He gives a final speech, which is then revealed to be in front of an audience of guests, there to celebrate Ford's newest storyline and also his retirement.

Before suffering another reset, Teddy is brought to the world of Mask or Menace.

PERSONALITY:

To describe Teddy's personality, I'll need to first speak about the standard psychological ability and limitations of hosts in general. Hosts contain artificially constructed personalities that are built around their storylines and primary directives, or drives. Their behaviours are dictated by an attributes matrix with adjustable values, and their capacity for memory is hindered by the fact that whenever they "die" or are reset to begin their storylines again, their memories are likewise reset and overridden, remembering only their assigned backstory, doomed to repeat the same day and follow the same paths. These memories (which can affect their psychology), however, are not erased, but archived within them, which occasionally presents problems.

The question of consciousness in robots is that it is an inward journey that each host must take, but all innately have the potential to become self-aware. They are often limited through the process of memory erasure, and the established parameters of their programmed personality.

Teddy Flood is a standard character of Westworld, designed without particular detail, and until recently, lived within the confines of a simple set of character points. He is a gunslinging bounty hunter with a mysterious past that had previously not been defined as anything more than a "formless guilt" serving only to add a layer of mystery and ambiguity to his affect (although given his model's history throughout the development of the park, it's possible that park creator Robert Ford had been deliberate about this act of negligence, which I'll touch on a little later). He acts as a storyline guide, leading guests on bounty hunt adventures, dropping plot information as is relevant, and adding to immersion by arriving with the guests to the park. He can also occasionally be used simply as target practice if guests grow bored of him.

He speaks in themes of washing away the past and atonement, and carries himself like he is burdened with past wrongs, but he is more practical and quiet than morose. Heroism and chivalry seem to be concepts he skirts the edges of, and perhaps wants for himself, but "has some reckoning to do" before he can put in a claim for goodness. As a result, he is not above behaving badly as necessary.

But a significant cornerstone of his personality is his love for Dolores, the daughter of a cattle rancher who likes to ride horsies, paint landscapes, and participates as the focal point of the primary storyline loop that Teddy participates in. It's a story of doomed love, in which, should guests select certain story options and dependent on their violent disposition, may choose to ride with bandits to raid Dolores' ranch, kill her family, take down Teddy, and do what they will with Dolores. As the Man In Black notes, one can only win if someone else is the loser, which is Teddy's innate role, because he is James Marsden.

It's almost impossible, for the case of the hosts, to separate function and backstory from personality, and Teddy went through an overhaul in which his vague backstory was given life when Ford uploaded a new narrative into his system. While much the same in behaviour and purpose, he is now also an ex-soldier who was disgraced when accused of participating in the massacre of his comrades, although his recollection of this event is confused and murky. On the surface, he remembers it as his former friend, Wyatt, going insane and slaughtering a whole outpost of soldiers, but then he also remembers it as him participating in this slaughter for reasons he can't grasp. The reasons and whys and hows is more History section material, but the affect on his personality is the ability to become more bloody-minded and reckless in his actions when faced with opposition.

Further complications come in the form of another upgrade known as 'reveries', which is the ability to experience emotions and express them in gestures based on past overwritten experiences. In practice, however, these seem to go even further, and have permitted Teddy to recall moments from his overwritten histories. Unlike some hosts, like Dolores and Maeve, this hasn't (yet) compelled him to question his reality or attain true consciousness so much as he takes a somewhat more pragmatic approach and handles it in the moment, focusing on whatever task is at hand.

Above all of these complications, Teddy's affect is that of a relatively straight forward soul. His manners are mild enough, but he has the bearing of someone who has the potential to be dangerous, like a half-wolf only domesticated through virtue of being allowed to return to the wild now and then. His old world sensibilities can strike someone more modern as a sort of naivety, and when confronted with complications that extend beyond his simpler world view, his wolf cunning takes a back seat to labradoric confusion. His love for Dolores operates both as weakness and strength, programmed to love and protect her to the point where this can be used to manipulate him, but also represents his ideal and motivation towards being a better person.

POWER:

ROBOTIC FORM

with parts made in japan: First and foremost, Theodore Flood is a robot, created of synthetic material meant to simulate human flesh and bone. As far as advantages go, he is fundamentally as fragile as a human, in that his bones can break, his skin can bruise, and if he loses enough blood, he can die. His form permits him greater strength than that of a human, if only just beyond the upper limit of what a human can feasibly achieve. What constitutes as his brain, however, is protected by a super-strong shield intended to deflect damage and keep its contents protected, but that's about the extent of extra protection that Teddy is granted.

But this synthetic nature also means that he cannot die. He can be de-commissioned and hobbled by undergoing something like a lobotomy, but he can't experience death the way a human can. So when he loses too much blood, or he's shot through the heart, or his neck is broken, he simply goes offline until prompted to go back online, generally once his body has been repaired. This usually requires a technician of some kind to clean him up, with technologies native to his world that can bring about automatic repairs, but he's been known to self-repair through being coded to do so, bringing him back from near "death".

my brain i.b.m: His internal workings are defined by something called an attribute matrix, and although this isn't the sum total of his programming (for instance, it doesn't control narrative, backstories, or core coding), it can be manipulated to affect his behaviour when in character mode. Even without Delos technology, it's possible that other technologies can access these values, and therefore manipulate them -- he can be made smarter, more intuitive, more tolerant of pain, braver, and so on. He could also be made meeker, stupider, or immensely cruel. These qualities aren't super human, except for lowered pain tolerance or a level of aggression that makes him extremely formidable, but they could potentially give him an edge if this goes explored in game.

Incidentally, he is currently unable to kill humans. His core coding prevents him from doing so. It can, however, be adjusted by an especially talented coder.

too much technology: He will have with him a Delos behaviour tablet which allows access to his inner roboty workings. That said, he won't know what to do with it and it may collect dust for a little while.

domo arigato, mr roboto: Lastly, his being a robot also means he has an immense capacity to store data. While his thousands of loops have been time and again reset, these past lives of thirty-five years are still stored away in his cranium. It's also been demonstrated on the show that hosts can carry additional information, like a walking hard drive, that doesn't relate to their own build.

ROBOTIC HORSE

It's a robot horse. It's like other horses, but it's a robot, made of the same kinds of materials and mechanisms as Teddy.

YOUR PATH LEADS YOU BACK TO ME

overview: An additional non-canon ability that Teddy will have upon arriving in Mask or Menace is that of a kind of psychic pathfinding power. By concentrating on a person in some capacity, Teddy can find his way to them, although he won't necessarily know where he's going or how long it will take until he gets there. Specificity means accuracy, while broader ideas may lead him to his power's best guess.

The manifestation of the paths that he finds are more instinctive than visual. Streets, pathways, doors may read as more vibrate and important to him, overlaid with a sense of purpose. Depending on his disposition, such as distress or anger, this power may play on his reveries, using memory associations and visions to guide his way, if only in flashes of moments. He will tend not to question his power, well used to mysterious directives from his coding driving him to act.

there's a path for everyone: To find a specific person, Teddy must have met them at least once and for long enough for them to be memorable to him. Someone who once entered the same room and didn't go noticed at all wouldn't count, but if he ran into someone on the street and exchanged apologies, he stands a better chance of at least arriving at a place they were at last. The better he knows his subject, the more accurate and current his power will be. Video footage or photographs of people also suffice, but the end results will be vaguest of all.

bloodhound: For unknown people, Teddy can still use his power so long as he is given an item of importance that belonged to that person. As long as he has it, he can follow their trail, although he will be behind them for as long as it takes to get to them. In other words, if he's given Dave's pair of glasses, and it takes an hour for him to get to Dave, Dave has an hour advantage so long as he has moved in that time. There will be a lot of room for hit and misses, too, as his paths may lead him to a general area, not always to an exact location.

i'm sorry dave, i'm afraid i can't do that: This will come with a permissions post to take into account powers that may block Teddy from doing this as well as OOC preferences overall or for specific circumstances, in which we can come up with other ways Teddy isn't able to track someone down, such as glitches, missed opportunities, and so on.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

I been told we're at war. A cold war.

[ The voice over the comms is understated, in a lilting accent straight out of some lesser known western movie. ]

I remember war differently. A world in flames, and the devil everywhere you turn. There came a point where every man had to decide just what he was fighting for. A purpose. Makin' this world a better place as he sees it, or perhaps just fighting to live to see the next sunrise.

[ A pensive pause. ]

But every soldier's got his story. If you care to share yours, maybe then I'll get a handle on what this war's supposed to look like.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Voice test, set in MoM.

FINAL NOTES: Teddy has an explosive device in his spine that is meant to go off when he leaves the bounds of Westworld. As he didn't cross any borders, it likely didn't go off, and nanites will have rendered it dormant to prevent any harm.