etraya application | with a thousand lies and a good disguise

[equivo]

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Beth, she/her
age: 33
contact: terriblepurpose or terriblepurpose on Discord

⏵ character information
name: Francis 'Trickster' Krouse
canon: Worm
age: 18
canon point: Several months post arc 19, during his imprisonment in the Birdcage
history: Here.
abilities:
• nationally competitive e-sports player
• skilled battlefield tactician
• proficient with handguns
• sleight of hand
• excellent liar and manipulator
• assortment of criminal skills such as robbery, evading pursuit, and general skulduggery
• superpower: teleportation. Krouse can swap himself or anything he's touching or has in his line of sight with other things of equivalent mass, with the ability to make up minor differences by compressing adjacent air. (This does not make a lot of physical sense, but neither does teleportation.) Objects he teleports retain their momentum and direction. The major limitation on what he can teleport is finding a similar mass to swap with.
• (on the TDM, Krouse has a minor technology-related power that won't be carrying over into the game, because it's a temporary enhancement granted via another character's powers - just noting that here for reference)

personality:
Krouse is good at being the bad guy.

It's the mask he presents to the world: cocky, devil-may-care, and more than willing to come off as a bastard if it gets him closer to achieving his goals. He's quick-witted, confident, and always working an angle. Annoying on purpose, because he's just good enough to get away with it, and unabashed about his tendency to manipulate situations to his personal advantage. He could almost be charming, if he wasn't such a prick.

This persona is something Krouse puts effort into. When he was in high school, he preferred being unlikable on purpose over being unlikable by accident. As one of his few closer acquaintances pointed out to him, it was a way of testing people, seeing how much they were willing to put up with without walking away from him. In the life that came after, it turned into a form of armour and a way to control his team's dynamics: if he was the lightning rod for all the blame going around, it meant that it was going to someone who could handle it.

Krouse stakes most of his personal sense of value on what he can handle. Being able to cope, deal with difficult situations, and make the calls other people are reluctant to make are the ways he demonstrates that he's worth something. It doesn't matter if he's appreciated as long as he's providing what he thinks other people need from him. Most of his interpersonal problems come from how he tends to misread what those needs are, prioritizing keeping the people he feels responsible for alive and functioning over figuring out how to address the way they feel.

All of this said, the qualities that Krouse emphasizes about himself in his performance are real. Part of the calculation he makes is how he plays up his strengths and the flaws he thinks are acceptable ones, while downplaying the things about himself he actually wants to conceal. Like many people so focused on maintaining a persona, Krouse is insecure about what people might find if they ever managed to get a look under the mask. If people knew how much he doubted himself, or had an idea of how often he doesn't actually know what he's doing, he's afraid he'd lose their respect for his competence, which matters more than their respect for him as a person.

The reason that Krouse committed himself so completely to living like this was devotion. There's one person in the world he feels gave him the benefit of the doubt: his girlfriend, Noelle. When an ill-judged effort to save her life left her with severe and lasting consequences, Krouse tried to shoulder the blame and responsibility of that, too, and not without cause. Finding a way to reverse what he did to her and get her (and the rest of their team) home safely became all he cared about, and his abject failure to achieve any of that is something he now has to live with.

Coming into Etraya, Krouse is dealing with the aftermath of losing everything he defined himself by. Defaulting to the mask will be his first move, but underneath that, the guilt that fed his self-doubt has only intensified. Without an anchor to keep him tethered, he'll be searching for something new to make his mission - for better or for worse.

samples:
TDM thread with Jessica Jones

TDM thread with Rita Mordio

TDM thread with Noelle Meinhardt