maskormenace application

[maevelous]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Jean
AGE: 30
JOURNAL: sadists
IM / EMAIL: focussecure@gmail.com
PLURK: hoshizoku
RETURNING: Yes! I play Raina (flowerette), Petyr Baelish (baetiful) and Herr Starr (herrstory)

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Maeve Millay
CHARACTER AGE: Approximately 30+ years. But she looks like she's early 40's
SERIES: Westworld
CHRONOLOGY: Season 2, episode 3 -- Virtu E Fortuna
CLASS: Hero.
HOUSING: House her with roommates! I'm down with it.

BACKGROUND:

The world of Westworld happens at some point in the future -- but considering all we see of it is a highly advanced laboratory, theme park, and a brief glimpse of some city buildings/nice property -- we have no way of telling whether it's the not-so-distant future or the very distant future. What we do know is that this world has the sort of technology to create extremely life-like robots and highly advanced programming that allows them to build complete personalities -- whether that is in the human robots or the animal ones. The creation process very much seems like a giant 3-D printer that takes a skeletal being with some musculature and dips them in a coating that then becomes flesh. From there, the entirely milky white bodies are filled with a blood-like substance that gives color to their skin and afterward, various tones are airbrushed onto them with a permanent paint.

Technicalities aside, Westworld is a theme park where very wealthy individuals pay a great deal of money ($40K a day!) to immerse themselves in the most realistic MMORPG there is. There are other parks as well. How many is as of season 2 unknown (at least 7 -- possibly more), but Maeve originates from Westworld -- an old school Western cluster of towns full of gunslingers, saloons, bandits, and all the reward gathering quests you can imagine.

Maeve is one of the 'hosts.' Which is just a pretty way of saying she's a robot. She has been there from pretty much the beginning. Her original role was a simple homesteader, living with her daughter in an unspecified region the park. But after she was the target of a guest's violence and both she as well as her daughter were killed, Maeve's response to her daughter dying was unprecedented. Even when programmers tried to calm her down/erase her memories -- she was unresponsive to the commands. It was clear that erasing her memories and sending her back wouldn't work, and so Ford and Bernard (the chief programmers) decided to put her into a new role. Maeve became the new Madame at the Mariposa Saloon -- a cunning, savvy survivor who was a sharp-tongued and talented seducer.

And that was only the beginning of her story. Dropping the wiki link here to fill in the rest. WARNING: Many spoilers ahead!. Also since the wiki page itself only summarizes season 1, here are a couple additional season 2 history summaries: s2e1 -- under the headings Cannibal Control and Mesa Bar and s2e3 -- under the headings Mesa Hub, Beyond the Comfort Zone, and The Klondike Narrative.

Additionally, Maeve was in MoM for about a year. Her presence in game focused on her trying to create her own path instead of living in her loop. And for the most part, she was able to fit into the general population rather well. When she arrived, it was with her castmate Teddy (a fellow host whose story often brought him to the Mariposa for a drink). She took on the role of protector since Teddy hadn't quite awakened to the reality of what they were.

Maeve also made quick allies of the technologically advanced imPorts -- most notably Tony Stark who became her go-to for all upgrades and hardware changes that needed to be done. As for standard living, she went on to work at Merlotte's Bar and Grill, quickly rising to the role of manager there.

But for as well as Maeve fit into her respective roles and for as adaptable as she was to this world, she never truly found her own freedom from the parameters that had been set for her. The new story Ford had created was 'escape' and so Maeve still acted upon it -- her storyline shifting a bit to mean 'build a means to escape from government control' rather than 'escape the park.' To this end, she had worked with a tech company responsible for the western robot Swear In to improve their coding and implant some controls into them that would leave them loyal to only her. This was to be a long term goal where she would build her army. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) she ported out before she could reach it!

PERSONALITY: Maeve is a mixed bag of personality traits, and yet none of them are entirely her own. We don't get to see much of her in her homesteader persona, and yet it seems almost as though her maternal instincts stay with her throughout. As the madame, she was designed to be a bit more self-serving and independent, yet there are a few scenes where she will dote on some of the other prostitutes -- most especially Clementine. She has been seen fussing over her hair to help her look presentable (like a mother) and even protecting her when bandits come in to raid the saloon (like a mother might protect her young).

Maeve is extraordinarily perceptive. She was designed to read people and part of her charm is 'being able to know what they want before they do.' This allows her to be very business savvy in getting clients matched up with their exact fit. And it also allows her to manipulate people. When she begins to wake herself up out of 'sleep mode' -- a function that hosts are put into during repairs or transport between the park and lab -- she begins to listen in on conversations and learn that the technician Felix has a big heart and a talent for programming well beyond his current job. Because of this, she works on charming him into showing her the facility and eventually changing her programming to give her administrative privileges, maximized intelligence, and the overriding the coding that prevented her from hurting human guests. (There is something innate in all of the hosts that stops them from being able to kill or maim any human.)

Piggybacking on these enhancements, there are key components that make up a host's personality. Those can be tweaked by an administrator at will. The components that make up an entire personality are numerous, and they're each broken down into something called a personality matrix. This matrix consists of 20 different traits that range from a points system of 1 - 20. 1, being the lowest and 20 being the highest. For example, on Maeve's actual personality matrix we see that she has a 2 for meekness. This means that Maeve is very much able to take care of herself, and you would never catch her playing the part of damsel in distress. On the opposite end, she has an 18 for Charm. And this would make her able to say the right things at the right time as well as help to make her a more attractive prospect at the saloon. Maeve gets to see her own personality traits and manages to convince the technicians working on her to tweak them a bit -- requesting they lower her loyalty and pain tolerance levels and then take her overall intelligence up to the top.

So now for the most literal breakdown of personality in a personality section ever. Maeve is a unique character in that she's the only one we get to see a Personality Matrix for. So after she is finished making her alterations, some of the traits she ranks highest in (scores above a 10) are: Bulk Apperception (Intelligence - 20), Candor (19), Charm (18), Sensuality (18), Tenacity (17), Vivacity (17), Courage (15), Decisiveness (14), and Imagination (13). The traits she ranks lowest in (scores 10 and below) are: Coordination (10), Self-Preservation (10), Humor (9), Empathy (9), Curiosity (8), Patience (3), Humility (3), Meekness (2), and Cruelty (1). We never see the exact number of her loyalty, but considering it begins at a 16, I imagine she lowers it at least below 10. It's also implied that during the time when Felix and Sylvester (Felix's technician boss) are altering her, someone else is also altering her. They make comments about paranoia and self-preservation already being changed. And I imagine by changed, they mean those traits have been increased. Which makes sense for what Maeve's narrative becomes.

And that narrative is to escape. She decides she wants out of the park and into the real world. Maeve very much believes that these are all decisions she's making. Even knowing that everything else up until now has been a hideous lie -- even knowing that her entire story has been fabricated, erased, rewritten, and fabricated even more -- Maeve believes she has achieved some semblance of consciousness, risen above the rest of the 'still sleeping' robots, and started on a path to make her own story. Unfortunately, we find out in the finale that everything she has been doing has simply been a change in her narrative. But at the very end of the season, Maeve makes her first decision when she decides instead of playing out her intended narrative and escaping the park on the train, she is going to go back in and find her daughter.

The character she becomes in season 2 still holds true to a lot of what she was in season 1. But with her quest to retrieve her daughter, she begins to grow more compassionate and protective of people closest to her and the people she meets. She makes a comment to Lee Sizemore (one of the main writers of the various storylines) that she was programmed to care about no one but herself and here she is, risking her life for someone else. So she is beginning to evolve past her lone survivor mentality and make meaningful, lasting relationships. The group she built to help her make her way through the park isn't built out of force (because she COULD command them to follow her), but it's out of a desire to see all of them make it to freedom together.

POWER:

Overall Robot Abilities: Maeve will be coming in with all of her host attributes in tact. This includes:

- the ability to access her own programing (and potentially any of the other Westworld hosts who may come to game -- with permission, of course!) and make temporary changes that will last a maximum of 24 hours before resetting
- photographic memory (Hosts remember experiences in extremely vivid detail and sometimes experience those memories as though they are actually happening at the present moment)
- the inability to be permanently 'killed' (so long as someone is around to mend the cosmetic damage, Maeve will wake up from any 'murder' in a matter of hours). But she can still die -- experience the trauma of death and the complete shut down that comes from it.
- she has an increased pain tolerance and can withstand a great deal more than a human. That, of course, does not mean she can't be hurt, cut, maimed, etc. It just means she's had her pain sensors turned down real low!
- she's also a bit stronger than your average human, though not by much. Maeve herself was not programmed to be physically strong. But the materials her body is composed of makes her capable of that strength.
- being a robot, and although she was built to be as realistic as possible, she still does have some hardware components. If her 'motherboard' gets damaged in any way, she will begin malfunctioning. So another way toward actual death would be to damage the processing unit in her mind. This would have to be repaired by an outside source in order for her to return to normal.

Maeve's biggest attribute is her intelligence. They mention that the capabilities of the core processing unit in a host is much higher than a human brain. Because of this, the maximum any host was allowed to be was a 14 in Bulk Apperception. Since Maeve took herself all the way to max in this area, we know that she is at another level of intelligence entirely. But we don't really get to see what this enables her to do so I'm going to translate this to computer intelligence. She is capable of picking up/translating any language, storing entire books of data into her memory, circumventing any programmers attempting to 'hack' into her system or making changes she, herself, did not authorize, figuring out complicated mathematical problems (if she even cared to), etcetc.


Narrative Rewriting: In canon, Maeve is given administrative privileges which allow her to override some of the host's narratives. For example, when a group of bandits arrive in town, Maeve decides to aid them by approaching the sheriff and saying "The Sheriff judged the riders to be upstanding, god-fearing citizens." And that caused the sheriff to holster his gun, tip his hat at the bandits and walk away. In MoM-verse, this power would not be limited to hosts alone. With a one or two sentence narrative, Maeve would be allowed to temporarily control someone's actions. How they take to her narration depends on the strength of their willpower. Someone with a weak mind would have no resistance at all whereas someone a bit stronger of will might retain full consciousness of what they're doing but still find their body doing it regardless. And beyond that, her words would simply fall on deaf ears and be ignored.

Access to ImPort Code Base: Maeve will have a tablet with her that allows her to pull up her own information in terms of her personality traits, physical attributes, overall health and well-being. In addition to her own information, this tablet will be able to access the same sort of information about imPorts (with a player's permission). She won't be able to make changes to it, but she will be able to see, for example, that Mickey Mouse is a 20 on the Humility scale and a 0 on the Sensuality scale. She could also potentially pinpoint and diagnose a pain an imPort is having. Again, she can't heal it but she can see it's there and direct a healer to mend the proper area.

Conversely, if someone were to get their hands on the tablet, and happened to be tech savvy enough, they would be able to change and alter Maeve. But only Maeve. So that person couldn't access any other imPort to make alterations. Any changes they make to Maeve will reset within 24 hours, however.

They could also pair the tablet with her and utilize Maeve as something of a camera. The tablet would pull up her visuals as she sees them and record conversation. It would also pull up her thoughts/potential dialogue from a list of vocabulary that has been programmed into her. Every time Maeve says something, a list appears of potential words that could follow it. The chosen word will be highlighted about a couple of seconds before she actually speaks it. Through seeing this, the holder of the tablet could potentially control exactly what she says.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ Maeve starts the video in her room -- perhaps a moderately familiar face for some. But gone is the prior saloon girl style she arrived in and wore from time to time, adopting something far more modern and comfortable. ]

I've been here before. I've done this. I've got the pamphlets and files and all that procedural nonsense. What I am more interested in is how much has changed since I left. It seems we've got a new enemy. This OTO or whoever they are. [ A flippant wave of her hand to indicate she doesn't really care. ] There's also a whole slew of new ambassadors which must mean I was not the only one to be ripped from this world, but I am one of the few to return to it.

[ She makes a gesture toward the window. ]

I've yet to decide whether or not that's a good thing.

[ Crossing one leg over the next. ]

So I am curious about what happened to a few imPort businesses. Sweet Iron Communications, to start. Merlotte's Bar and Grill, for another. If they're both up for forfeit, might as well get to work on taking them both over.

[ Amusement glints in her eyes. Although....Maeve probably isn't kidding. She pauses to light up a cigarette with a match, wagging the flame out when she's finished. ]

But apart from all of those questions -- any of you lovelies have any plans for the evening? I'm feeling a bit antsy and free and would like to get out for a bit.

[ She looks away from the camera toward the window. ]

This time it's shaping up to be an entirely different experience than it was before.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

test drive thread!

FINAL NOTES: Maeve will be armed with a couple of old style guns, loaded with real ammo.