Subnautica Application

[timexposure]

OOC INFORMATION
NAME: Alex
AGE: 18+
PREFERRED CONTACT: yellassbutt, PMs
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A

IC INFORMATION
NAME: Maxine "Max" Caulfield
AGE: 18
CANON: Life is Strange
CANON POINT: About halfway through episode 3: Chaos Theory. Aka, before Shit Starts Getting Real.

Furthermore, as this is a choice-driven game, some of the major choices ("major," as in those recorded as major choices by the game itself) she's made up to her canon point are as follows:

- She reported Nathan having a gun at school
- She intervened to help Kate when David was questioning her
- She came out of hiding to intervene when David burst into Chloe's room
- She talked Kate out of her suicide attempt
- She blamed Nathan for Kate's suicide attempt, rather than David or Jefferson
- She did not steal the money from her school
- She kissed Chloe

CANON INFORMATION: Wiki link! The canon does deal with some heavy stuff, including suicide, kidnapping, and forced drugging, just in case.

PERSONALITY:

Max comes across as your typical, pretentious hipster artist. And it's not something she really tries to deny either. She's pretentious, definitely, and as a photography student, very much into her art. Her art is extremely important to her, but she doesn't have much confidence in it. She goes so far as to rip up her entry for a photography contest, simply because she believed it wasn't good enough. She loves it, she wants to keep doing it, but simply lacks the confidence at the start.

It's just part of her, really. Max isn't very outgoing in general. She's friendly and generally polite to people, but she's also shy and distant, and doesn't really engage with people much, mainly due to her own insecurities. Which isn't to say that she's completely disconnected from the world around her. Throughout the game, she has vivid internal monologues about everyone she knows and about every place she goes to, showing she does pay attention to her surroundings. She knows many of the rumors floating around and knows at least a little about each of her classmates.

This is also in part because Max is very... nosy. Really, what other way is there to gain so much material for internal monologues about everyone? When visiting her classmates' dorm rooms, she doesn't hesitate to snoop around whenever she can, even if it can get her in trouble. And she'll listen in on conversations whenever she can, going as far as to take advantage of her newly discovered powers for both snooping and eavesdropping.

Even so, Max only rarely approaches people she isn't already close to. She holds herself at arm's length from even some of her friends as well, only sometimes daring to show her true feelings in their entirety, so to speak. While part of the reason for this is that she has only recently returned to Arcadia Bay for the first time in years, it still very much seems to be how she treats everyone, especially with how she makes little to no reference to close friends where she'd been living before returning. The fact is she's just insecure about her relationships as well and about how she comes across to people.

Over the course of the game, however, that all begins to change. Reconnecting with Chloe and finding herself in the middle of everything strange that's going on in Blackwell Academy and Arcadia Bay are what begin to shake her loose from her shell and force her to not only truly engage with the world around her, but to step up and take action. By accidentally rewinding time by wanting to save Chloe's life that first time, she puts herself right in the middle of it all with no way of avoiding it. She can no longer keep herself distant from what's going on.

And it's these events, ranging from figuring out what's up with those visions she's getting to saving more than one friend's life, that are the catalyst to her gaining self-confidence as the days go on.

She really gets to know her classmates, one on one, rather than through what she sees and overhears. And being able to change even small interactions with them to make herself look good, and having "all the right answers," as another character observes, certainly helps. It's easy to feel confident, after all, when it's impossible to look stupid in front of someone else. She needs only rewind time to pick her words more carefully, to already know something she might have been told later during the course of a conversation.

She also has somewhat of a "helping people" thing (if the player so chooses, but we'll be going with that) and her newfound abilities make it much easier to indulge in it. Not only does she look after Kate however she can and asks after her well-being every chance she gets, even up to the point where Max interferes to defend her when David, the school security guard, is questioning her, but one minor running gag is her using her ability to save a classmate from small unfortunate accidents, such as having a roll of toilet paper lobbed at her or her being accidentally shoved into the school pool.

That doesn't mean she only ever uses her powers for good though. She's not going around doing anything awful, but more than once, she has the choice for things such as dropping paint on the resident mean girl's outfit or knocking over a quasi-enemy's plate of food. And when Max gets fired up, she really gets fired up. She yells at David for the way he's treating her friends, she can taunt Victoria for the way she's treated Max, and she can taunt the guy who ends up being behind how one of her friends got hurt. Even as he's got Max captive. It's just not something she does very often.

Most of all, however, Max's driving force is the best friend she's reconnecting with: Chloe. It's Chloe who's the catalyst to not only all the story's events, but to all the changing and growing that Max does as a result of them. And as a result of Chloe's influence.
Chloe is extremely important to Max, even after years of no contact between them, and she is at the center of many of the major events Max takes part in during the course of the game, from both before and after her canon point. It's trying to save Chloe that gives Max her rewind ability in the first place, even before she realizes just whose life she's trying to save. It's wanting to give Chloe a happier life, one where her dad never died, that allows Max to discover just how far back she can go in time if she uses pictures of herself. (And it's this ability that later saves Max's life.) She's willing to go back, knowing it might change everything about the present she knows, just because she wants Chloe to be happy.

Furthermore, the final choice of the game, the biggest one of all, is all about Chloe. Max can choose to go back one last time, to let Chloe die in the event that gave Max her power, in order to prevent the tornado she's been having visions of from tearing through Arcadia Bay. Or she can choose to let Arcadia Bay take its chances with the tornado, to do nothing, just to save Chloe's life. Both are presented as equally likely for Max to choose: as her sacrificing someone she cares so much about and has spent so long trying to keep alive in order to save everyone else, or as her potentially sacrificing everyone else for this person she cares so much about.


ABILITIES: Max has limited power over time. She has what she calls her "rewind power," which allows her to turn time back around her. It is very limited, however, as the longer she goes back, the more of a toll it takes on her, and she generally only goes back a few seconds, sometimes minutes, at a time.

When she turns back time, it doesn't affect her or anything on her, only her surroundings. So she can, for example, break a vase to grab something inside it, then turn back time to before it was broken and still have what she took from it. In much the same manner, she can brute force her way past a locked door, go inside the room on the other side, then turn back time so the door is locked again.

In one extreme case, she was able to stop time around her when she couldn't manage to rewind enough to save a friend's life. This was, however, extremely difficult for her and she was never able to replicate it.

Though at her canon point she has yet to attempt this, or even realize she can do it, Max is also able to go back in time by looking at pictures of herself. She can go back to whatever moment is captured in the picture, although every time she does it, the changes are, understandably, very big ones.

Occasionally, Max also gets visions of the future, although they seem to be a direct side effect of her using her rewind power. They only ever show one event: a devastating tornado about to hit her hometown of Arcadia Bay.

As her time-reversing ability is potentially gamebreaking, I'll be limiting it. Unless the mods would prefer something else, or that they be disabled entirely, I'll be having her mostly unable to use her abilities. She will have no visions, she will not be able to discover her ability to travel back in time through pictures, and she will not be able to stop time entirely. Her regular rewind will be extremely limited as well and will only feel like she sort of jumped back, maybe a second, maybe a split second, no more than that.

In the not-related-to-time-at-all side: She's pretty good at photography.

INVENTORY: Besides her clothes, she'll have her messenger bag, containing:

- 1 camera
- 1 journal
- School supplies: a notebook and pencil case
- 1 cellphone, no longer functioning

MEMORY ALTERATION: The day after breaking into Blackwell Academy, while Max was snooping around David's garage in Chloe's house, she rewound time. It was only meant to take her back a few seconds, just enough to do... something she can't remember. But instead, she ends up in Iniidae.

She'll only have vague memories of just what was happening when she decided to rewind time, no matter how hard she tries, and she'll assume she just somehow overshot it and ended up...

Somewhere? Maybe the future? She'll try not to think about it too hard.

SAMPLE: One! and two! Though I could write something up if those aren't enough.