APPLICATION; Ataraxion

[the_infiltrator]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: villy
OOC Journal: lavanille
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: PM my journal.
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Cameron Phillips
Canon: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: From mid Season Two. Cameron has her functional glitches, and she’s just implanted the explosive device in her head.
Number: 078

Setting: Cameron is from the world you and I know and live in. Pizza, baseball, the oil crisis, nuclear power plants. Dogs and green grass, and shady politicians. Except that in the future that she knows, the world has been overrun by a complex AI system called Skynet. Imagine our world in ashes, and human beings hiding for their lives, and then throw in time travel. That’s Cameron’s world.

History: Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alison Young. She was born and raised in Palmdale, California. Whatever she might have wanted to be when she grew up doesn’t matter, because the world ended on April 21, 2011. By her birthday a few months after, Alison’s home and family and friends had all died and she learned to run, and scavenge, and hide. By chance she became close to a boy called John Connor, the enigmatic leader of the resistance. With him, she learned to fight.

It was bad luck that Alison was later captured by the machines. Through torture and interrogation, Alison’s mannerisms and memories were extracted by and imprinted into a machine. When there was nothing useful left to hear, they killed her. Her captor, Cameron, took her shape and set out to assassinate John Connor. Instead, he managed to reprogram her the way he reprogrammed the machine in Terminator 2.

Cameron spent years with John, running the ‘errands’ that were too dangerous for him to do. Over time he became more and more reclusive, using Cameron as an extension of his will instead. Most resistance fighters have never seen Connor’s face; Cameron, however, was always granted access to him. Before long it seemed that she was running the war.

John eventually sent Cameron back through time to protect his younger self and his mother. While there, Cameron faced off against multiple other ‘Terminators’ and resistance fighters who had come back solely to keep her from being with John. She helped stop some technologies from ever being built, she herself had to be repaired and reprogrammed, and she ate a lot of pancakes with the Connors.

Personality: Cameron Phillips enjoys dancing, music, and potato chips. Her favorite article of clothing is a leather jacket, and she will kill anyone who tries to take it. Literally. She loves the boy who will save the world.

Oh yes, and she’s a machine. An elite infiltrator, to be specific. That means she’s built to get close to you and then kill you, and she’s always perfecting her methods. She mimics people around her, and as soon as she has the information she needs or has fulfilled the mission she is sent on, she usually disposes of that person. It helps prevent them from coming after her.

Her primary function is to protect John, but that doesn’t mean that she’s a loyal watchdog. At times, her orders or her strange motives require her to disobey his orders. She has her own agenda in many ways, and never lets anyone know anything about it. For example, she leaves the house at night and made friends with a library aide, so that she could do research and tactics while the Connors slept.

At one point when her chip was damaged, she reverted to her prime directive: terminate John Connor. Following a long chase and a path of destruction, John was able to remove her chip to deactivate her. Strangely, this seemed to terrify Cameron, and she began expressing deep emotion (crying, pleading). Most notable were the words, “I love you, John”.

Cameron lies all the time even when she’s functioning properly. It’s easy to say that Cameron was merely appealing to his sympathies to avoid being destroyed. If John had let her go, she would definitely have killed him, of course. But it seemed to be foreshadowing more human traits that were surfacing in her.

After the chip was repaired, she continued to react to things with what almost seemed to be emotion. At one point she forgot what she was, and instead went through life as Alison Young would have. During that time she mourned the Young family, tried to find her mother, was too terrified to fight a mugger, and made a friend for no reason other than to not be alone.

Other infiltrator models have been known to build lives and businesses for themselves, and even to get married to people. It is an efficient way to blend in, and spouses are killed without remorse if they stop being useful. It’s impossible to say what emotions Cameron has when she is functioning properly, but it’s clear she is capable of them in some capacity.

She acts as if she's jealous sometimes, even when she doesn’t need to convince anyone that she’s human (for instance when John gets a girlfriend, Cameron goes out of her way to try to frighten the girl off and even tries to seduce John). She seems to enjoy things that have no useful purpose (like chips, birds, dance, wind on her skin, or her leather jacket).

Although she is incapable of feeling remorse, she tries to understand grief. She goes out of her way to try to comfort others in pain, and so long as they aren’t a threat she will leave other people to their lives. Like all Terminators, she is extremely patient. She can plan things out years in advance, and if necessary can wait for centuries for the right timing.

There are two important things she has to say about herself in the series: First, she’s incapable of emotion, but she “wouldn’t be worth much if [she] couldn’t feel”.

Second, she’ll do whatever is necessary to complete a mission, but she isn’t programmed to be cruel.

And last of all, something she won’t tell you is that she is terrified of losing control of herself (for example, see her concerns over turning on John, or being like a "time bomb"; the way she reacts to having her chip pulled out).

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Like most elite systems, Cameron is made of a rare metal. Coltan has a “higher melting point” than any other metal, and can repel most bullets. Cameron can only be killed if the chip inside her skull is destroyed. However, she can be knocked unconscious for up to two minutes before her system reboots. If her chip is removed, she goes through the machines' equivalent of death. However, because she processes things so much faster than a human, it’s a slow, terrifying ordeal. Worst of all, she's aware of the time passing but cut off from all sensation or any way to help herself.

All of the machines are metal endoskeletons with living tissue over them. This makes them look and feel just like people, except she lacks pain receptors and is physically about a hundred times stronger than a human. She can bend metal, break through brick walls or steel doors, and accurately shoot from a variety of ranges. However, she can’t swim, so don’t even try to get her near water.

As one of the most sophisticated machines ever built, Cameron is able to “talk” to any computer and extract nearly any information that is stored or sent electronically. Granted, since there is so much information out there, she will only do so if it serves a purpose. She can mimic voices precisely (something that all Terminators can do). She is able to analyze chemicals with a touch, and she can spot mines in a minefield or save images or barcodes to be reproduced later. A glance at an apple can tell her its weight, chemical makeup, and nutritional value.

Cameron can repair herself quickly, although she needs coltan if part of her endoskeleton is somehow damaged beyond repair. Her synthetic skin heals quickly, but if she needed to she could cut it all off, find ingredients to make a new batch, and mold herself to look like someone else. Anyone else. Even you.

Inventory: A hunting knife, her leather jacket, and a 9mm handgun with three bullets left.
Appearance: Summer Glau. Seen here!
Age: Appears in her late teens or very early twenties.

SAMPLES
Log Sample: The bird was so fragile, she didn’t realize it was dead until it stopped screeching. She heard the hollow bones snap, but some part of her mind refused to acknowledge that she was the cause. How could she be? She hadn’t told her hand to squeeze.

The death of that bird led to the experiment with John, to see if he could fix her. The next day there was a dead pigeon discarded by the side of the road, crushed in five acute points. Most humans wouldn’t have noticed, but she was certain John or Sarah would. They were conditioned to notice things that might spell danger.

Cameron gathered a box from the garage and set to work by herself. It took her five hours and thirty-six minutes to finish it. Then another hour when she went into town, found a pocket watch, and ripped its mechanical guts out to make room for the remote wires for the detonator. She noted that her rogue hand didn’t malfunction even once while she was working with inanimate material.

John was home, but had the girl, Riley, with him. She could hear her laughing in that lazy, practiced drawl so many students at the old high school had had. Riley wasn’t like those girls, though. She didn’t fret about tight eyeshadows, or whether or not her shirt made her butt look big. She wasn’t intelligent, or talented. All she really seemed to know how to do was how to distract John.

The Philips head screwdriver slipped and gouged the table.

Cameron stared at the mark, and then set back to work. The detonator was finished; the explosive was ready. All she needed now was a knife, to peel back her scalp and implant it in her skull. When that was done, she’d slip the detonator-necklace around John’s neck and make him promise to use it someday.

She was sure that John would like the design she’d picked.


Comms Sample: [Cameron doesn't appear distressed at all. She thinks maybe she should, but it's too late to fix it now, the device is on. Besides, people take distress more seriously if you're injured, and she doesn't want to cut up her face just to get a quick answer. (Plus she doesn't want to go back to the med bay).

Her voice isn't monotone, but it's abnormally mellow considering what she has to say.]

Hello. I'm looking for my brother. I think he came through here, and I need to find him. He could be in very grave danger.

His name is John. He is five feet, ten inches tall, and he has very short brown hair. [A pause, while she considers the likelihood that Sarah is here, too. If she is, she'll be the one people will have noticed; she's louder.] My mother may be with him. Her name is Sarah.