app for synodiporia

[detectivetroll]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Bri
AGE: 27
PLAYER JOURNAL: brbsoulnomming
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT: brbsoulnomming
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Nick Burkhardt
CANON: Grimm
POINT IN CANON: Mid-season 3 / AU
AGE: 33
APPEARANCE: image here!
CANON HISTORY: Wiki link
CANON PERSONALITY: In general, Nick is a very confident person. He’s gone through a number of trials and been a bit of an outsider as a teenager, but since then, he’d settled into his life and into who he was. Rather than making Nick arrogant, this manifests as Nick being pretty laid back. It takes a lot to shake Nick’s confidence. Mistake him and his partner for a gay couple? Nick just laughs and calls him honey. Snark at him insultingly? Nick just grins and snarks back. This falls right in line with his sense of humor. Nick loves sarcasm, and is pretty much a huge troll. He’s the kind of guy who will call a werewolf “good boy,” will make bad puns about people getting angry and losing their heads after cutting off said heads, and joke about someone not being able to hold their liquor after they drop a bottle of alcohol in fear. For the most part, Nick does know when to hold this back, and generally only does it with friends. Or suspects who can get offended if they damn well want to, Nick doesn’t care.

Nick’s current main source of insecurity comes from his new found status as a Grimm. This is something he has to hide from nearly everyone in his life, and it’s pretty much torn his relationship apart, because he’s not sure he can ever actually tell Juliette who he is. It’s hit him hard, because at his core, Nick is a very honest person, and he doesn’t know what to do now that he has to keep such a huge part of himself from the people he cares about. It’s also causing complications in his job, as he’s learning there are different rules for the Wesen community, and sometimes this goes against his duty as a cop, what he’s always thought was right. For the most part, Nick still holds his duty as a cop above all else, preferring to arrest the Wesen on his cases whenever possible, but there’s been times where he’s stepped outside of being a cop to actually be a Grimm. The longer he's been a Grimm, the more this behavior has come out, even to staging a crime scene, covering up the bodies of Reapers he's killed, and flat out lying to FBI agents when under investigation, which is pretty bad cop behavior. He’s mostly done this in order to protect the people he cares about.

This is because Nick is extremely protective of – and self-sacrificing for – his family and friends. He will do whatever it takes to protect them, whether that means bending the law, aggressively threatening people, or sacrificing his own life for them. If someone hurts one of them, or even attempts to hurt one, Nick is definitely the type to hold a grudge. And to make sure the other person is well aware of that grudge, even if that other person happens to be someone he’s supposed to be protecting. Although this is at its most evident with those close to him, Nick is also fairly protective in general. There’s a reason Nick became a cop, aside from it apparently being in his nature as a Grimm, and that’s because he wants to help people. All people, whether they be human or Wesen, which is apparently a concept that is hard for Wesen to accept from a Grimm.

Nick’s always been a good guy, and sometimes it’s frustrating, that people he’s only trying to help fear and mistrust him, because of who his ancestors were and what they did. Of course, this has only made him more determined to never be like the Grimms that the Wesen community fears. But he also isn’t above using this fear when it can help him – or, more accurately, when it can help him help someone else. Nick’s generally not aggressive at all, but he can be when he needs to, especially when someone else’s life is at stake, whether it be the life of a friend, or someone’s life on a case. This is especially true in cases concerning kids; Nick has a huge protective streak for teenagers and kids who are going through tough times or are outcasts, like he was, and cases involving them hit Nick very hard.

This seems to be part of his abilities as a Grimm, but even before that, Nick has always had excellent instincts. He’s good at reading body language, and often unconsciously uses that to better relate to, and to better understand people. His attention to detail is very high, as is suiting a detective, and the observations he makes about other people from these also help him when trying to relate to people. Part of what makes him good at this, though, is that Nick is generally incredibly genuine – and his earnest eyes probably don’t hurt, either – and when he’s trying to help someone, he really does want to do everything in his power to help them, and he usually knows what to do to make it happen. Because of this, Nick tends to find himself the leader in stressful situations, although if there’s someone there who knows more than him, Nick is more than willing to listen to them. He prefers to work with others, and works better when he can bounce ideas off other people and talk things out. Overall, Nick is generally a social person, and doesn’t shy away from displaying this, including often being physically affectionate.

However, Nick can be something of a workaholic. When he's on a case, particularly one that draws him in some personal capacity (like kids or a case involving Grimm stuff), he can be pretty single-minded. While he does his best to leave his work aside when he gets home, it still seeps in, sometimes bad enough for him to miss such important things as anniversary dinners. Granted, that was mostly because one of his closest friends had been kidnapped and was in very life-threatening danger, but it still happens. Even so, Nick is definitely a romantic. He's the kind of guy who remembers what they had for dinner on their first date, learns how to cook it, and makes it later. Nick likes big, romantic gestures like weekend getaways and planning the perfect proposal, but he doesn't shy away from smaller details like flirting in the grocery store or hand-holding.

Finally, Nick doesn’t particularly react well to death, or the loss of loved ones. He was devastated after his parents’ death, and has admitted that the only reason that he survived was because of his aunt. Nick tends to cling to what he does have left when this happens – in the case of his parents’ death, it was his aunt, and after his aunt’s death, he threw himself into detective and Grimm work. He has a tendency to deal with things by not dealing with them, and he’s very good at closing off and pretending everything is fine. In cases like this, Nick can definitely be a bit selfish. He knows Juliette would be safer if she wasn’t in his life, and he knows it wasn't fair how long he lied to her, but he could never bring himself to be the one to end things. Nick still wants to pretend that he can have at least a partially normal life.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: Nick is from the game savetheearth, where the premise is that characters are reincarnated versions of their canon selves who are slowly gaining back memories, abilities, and personality traits from their canon selves, called "echoes." His AU background in the game is as follows:

Nick was born in Portland, Oregon. Nick was an only child, and very close to both of his parents. So when Nick's parents were killed in a car accident when he was twelve years old, Nick took it extremely hard. He was reluctant to admit it, but he suffered heavily from survivor's guilt, even going so far as to wish he'd been in the car with them.

After his parents' death, Nick was taken in by his aunt and uncle. They were nice people, and Nick loved both of them, but neither of them knew how to deal with the depth of his grief for his parents. It was obvious that his aunt and uncle were worried about him, and he overheard them talking about sending him somewhere, or to someone. That was the last thing that Nick wanted. So he buried his grief, pretending everything was fine, and went on with his life. He was just a normal kid living a normal life with no hidden trauma, and maybe if everyone else believed that, then so would he. Eventually, it worked, at least on the surface.

Nick continued through middle and high school, a popular, outgoing boy who participated in everything from football to drama to music. He was one of those people who was constantly busy, always with something to do or someplace to go. Because of this, although Nick had many acquaintances and was very well-liked, he never had any real friends. Nick never saw anything wrong with this, though. In fact, he preferred not to get too close to people. He didn't want to open up to anyone and risk them reacting the way his aunt and uncle did, and he didn't want to risk losing someone like he had his mom and dad.

This continued as Nick graduated high school and went into college. He majored in criminal justice, was popular and active, and had a string of relationships that never lasted longer than a couple of months. Nick gained a small reputation as a bit of a player, but it never really took off because he was rarely the one to break up with his significant other. Nick was a sweetheart, apparently, he was kind, loyal, funny, intelligent, but he wasn't "emotionally available." If part of Nick worried about that, or wondered what it meant for his future, he ignored it like he did most such things, in favor of pursuing his degree.

After college graduation, Nick easily landed a job in the Portland police department. There he continued exactly as he had in college. Slowly he got more and more wrapped up in work, devoting the vast majority of his time to his cases as a homicide detective. This was only exacerbated when his aunt and uncle retired, and moved to Florida. With no significant other in his life, no close friends, and his only close family living far away, Nick didn't really have anything but his cases.

Eventually, Nick felt as though he needed a change of pace. He loved Portland, but there was nothing tying him there save for the city itself. He put in for a transfer, and ended up in Locke City.

There he woke up one day with a string of numbers in his head and an ability to connect to a network that few people could see. Initially Nick was reluctant to believe anything the people there said about police officers being corrupt, aliens invading, or the "network members" gaining special abilities, old memories, and new personalities, but after a while he couldn't ignore the evidence. Slowly, he made friends, people he trusted and cared about, and in order to stop the corrupt police officers from preying on them and other innocent people, Nick went undercover as one of them, hiding his identity as a network member.

He was able to obtain a lot of valuable information through doing this, although he also had to arrest a number of network members and turn them over to the police in order to make them trust him. Nick even underwent the modifications that corrupt police officers were receiving to give them abilities to combat network members, thanks to alien technology. Eventually, he and one of his closest friends discovered the location of alien's hide out. After an initial recon of the area, the network members launched an attack on it - though not after the alien had awakened the giant pink rock snake it had been sent to defeat, leaving it to attack the city. The network members were able to defeat both.

After this, knowledge of the network became public. The FBI got involved and a speedy investigation into the corrupt officers resulted in almost all of them being found out - although not Nick, or his best friend and fellow network member/corrupt cop. More aliens arrived with a claim of making peace, saying that the previous alien had been a renegade and they were sorry for his actions. Around this time, another threat to the network members emerged - the mafia. Extremely anti-network, the mafia began to take actions against the network members, everything from harassment to attempting to frame them for terrible crimes.

Nick went undercover again, this time as a corrupt police officer willing to be in the mafia's pocket. Once again, he obtained information to leak to other network members. But things escalated quicker than Nick thought, and two of the people targeted were his boyfriend and the teenage boy that Nick had become the guardian of. This ultimately result in the boy being murdered. By this point, Nick had lost just nearly all of the friends and family he'd made through the network, and he snapped. Using the information he'd gained from being undercover, he organized an attack against the leader of the mafia, planning to take out him and all of the higher up members of the mafia.

They were successful, though Nick didn't stick around to see the aftermath. He was done with the network, done with all of it, and he left all of the information he had with a few other network members to do with it as they would. Then he fled to Germany with his boyfriend, deciding to devote his time to the only thing that really mattered anymore.


Due to being a reincarnation, his personality differences are:

The first major difference is in sociability. Although Nick can be charming and kind, he's not a people person. He's never had any close friends, and he prefers to be alone, and to work alone, rather than with others. Because his aunt wasn't a Grimm, she wasn't able to understand his grief as a child, and couldn't help him work through it. As a result, Nick grew up with his grief buried, and learned to close himself off from anyone who might get too deep. He's too afraid to get close to people for fear they'll leave him like his parents, and to let them get close for fear they'll turn away like his aunt and uncle. Nick never really trusts people, because of his experiences with his parents and aunt, and because he no longer has the instincts that helped him be such a good judge of character.

Without any long-term relationships or significant friendships, Nick is the definition of a workaholic. He's lost track of whatever hobbies he picked up in college, and he's pretty much devoted only to the job. He doesn't really understand the whole 'leaving your work behind when you get home' thing. But as far as he's concerned, there was never any reason to, since he never had anyone at home to complain. Reincarnated Nick has no real idea how to be in a relationship. Sure, he likes the idea of being romantic, but in practice, well. He's never been very good at it.

Another major difference is how Nick approaches his job. Not only is he a workaholic, but he's a one hundred percent by the books cop. As far as he's concerned, there's no room for gray area. Nick's never had to deal with the whole Grimm thing making his work more confusing, and he's never had to try to figure out what was right on his own. He trusts the justice system implicitly, and doesn't think anyone should be an exception. This means that, unlike pre-reincarnation Nick, he would make little allowances for situation, and no allowances for friendship. He's never had a strong enough relationship with someone that would lead him to even think of not turning them in if they did something illegal.

Finally, although Nick is confident, it's not the confidence born of someone who knows and is okay with who he is. It's the cocky, almost arrogant confidence of someone trying to have something to hide behind. Nick's sarcasm can have a meaner edge to it, because he lacks the quality of genuine-ness that he had in his previous life. Although he'd never think of himself this way, because Nick does want to help people and is absolutely devoted to making sure justice happens for those who need it, Nick can definitely be a jerk.

After two years of being on the network and the echoes that came with it, Nick is now just as capable of trusting people as his canon self. He's mellowed out a lot from being a jerk, and having relationships other than work have made him a lot less of a workaholic. However, after gaining a group of people that he considered family and losing all but one of them to death or memory loss, Nick is a lot less social than he used to be, and his fear of losing who he does have left shapes a lot of what he does. After nearly two years of being undercover with shady organizations, he has strayed completely from his view of law as black and white. He doesn't see anything but grey now, and is a lot more willing to make tough choices that many people don't exactly see as moral, especially when it comes to protecting or avenging the people he cares about.


ABILITIES: Nick's canon abilities are detailed in the wiki link here. However, the only abilities Nick has are the ones he echoed back, as well as the modifications done to him using alien technology. They are as follows:

-> Nick was modified so that he now has nine lives. Whenever he "dies," his body will regenerate and undo whatever damage killed him. He's already used one life, meaning he has eight left.
-> Superhuman perception. Canonly this involved being able to see the nonhuman's true form, so it'll work much the same in game - he'll be able to see any features that mark someone as not human, even if they're currently hidden, but only with player permission.
-> Grimm blood, at a lower power level. This would mean than anyone not-human who ingested his blood, or otherwise got it into their system, would temporarily lose all or some of what makes them not human. Essentially, the duration of the re-humanification and what abilities or physical characteristics would be lost will be up to the player whose character it effects, although ICly the character would have no knowledge or control over this.
-> Innate ability with weapons. When he has access to a weapon, even one he's never used before, he will find himself able to wield it skillfully.
-> Part of his mental acuity as a Grimm - specifically, the indomitable will part that makes him resistant to most forms of mind control, hypnotism, and mental suggestion. This does not, however, make him at all drug resistant.
-> Enhanced hearing.
-> Superhuman speed/reflexes/endurance/strength. In canon, Nick's able to heal from things such as bruised ribs and a dislocated shoulder in under a week, instead of the usual 12-16 weeks of recovery for the latter. His echo returned about a third of his enhanced healing, meaning he will recover from injuries in about half the time that it would usually take.
-> Post-Traumatic Zombification Disorder. It comes with the final increase to his strength (upping him from above human level to able to punch through solid metal doors) and endurance, as well as a decreased need for oxygen. It also comes along with a decreased heart rate even during times of high activity, as well as decreased water and salt depletion. And it comes with occasional "episodes" of suspended animation where he basically blanks out for minutes at a time, with very minimal heart rate, no breathing, cold skin, and all the appearances of being dead. He is completely nonresponsive during these episodes, waking only when they're finished

INVENTORY;
-> his gun
-> one of his Grimm books
-> a leather vambrace
-> wallet, keys, cell phone
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? His info post from Save the Earth, including all of his echoes and his original app, is here!

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: 10+ comment thread from Save the Earth here!

PROSE SAMPLE:

Nick is… pretty damn pissed off, actually. He’d been mixed up the network and all of the crazy shit it brought about for nearly two years, now, and he’d just wanted to be done with all of it. He had zero desire to get involved with aliens or giant pink rock creatures or whatever else was coming next. All he wanted was to leave it all behind.

Even if there was a part of him that knew it wasn’t possible. For one, you can’t escape the network - he’d learned that back when he first got involved, when he’d tried like hell to just ignore all of it. For another, it was unlikely that he’d be satisfied doing nothing with his life, especially when he was pretty sure that Lyall was going to keep up with the network. Even if Lyall didn’t tell him about it, eventually, Nick wouldn’t be able to leave it be.

But he wasn’t there yet. He was still firmly in the land of just needing a vacation, of trying to get his head on straight. Of trying to figure out what kind of damage he’d done to his and Lyall’s relationship while he was so focused on revenge that he couldn’t see much of anything else, and trying to figure out how to undo it.

So finding himself magically in some weird looking airport is really not what he’d been looking to do today. He blames the network for it, of course, because any time something weird like this happens, it’s always because he’s a network member. For a moment, he lingers somewhere between resigned and annoyed, until he realizes that whatever had brought him here hadn’t brought Lyall with him.

Then he swings right into pissed, with an undercurrent of fear. That’s what gets him moving quicker, the search for answers now more urgent.