just a scavenger

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Mouself
Contact: Mouse#0862 on Discord
Age: 30
Current Characters: None


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Rey
Age: 19
Canon: Star Wars
Canon Point: After the Spark of the Resistance novel (on her history link, that’s right up to the “On Batuu” section)

Background: link to wiki

Personality: Before Rey even says a word in her first scene, there are several things we understand about her: she is smart, brave, distrustful, very lonely, and she is hopeful. She climbs around the skeleton of a crashed Star Destroyer with some degree of care but absolutely no fear, and she digs out salvageable parts with an experienced eye. She eyes the junk boss Unkar Plutt with as much distrust as she does resignation—she doesn’t think he’s given her an unfair deal, she knows, but also knows how little point there is in arguing. She lives alone, cooking for one in her tiny home made in a fallen transport vehicle from decades-old battle, and she sets traps to prevent others from invading. And inside that home, protected by desert and traps and metal walls and Rey’s own skills with her staff, we see her hope. She keeps little trinkets: flowers in a jar, a little doll of a rebel pilot, the helmet of a dead pilot she’s found in some wreckage. And she waits for someone to come back for her. She has an enormous wall of scratches on the metal wall of her home, marking the many years she’s survived on Jakku.

And that's the funny thing about Rey; she grew up on a dead, harsh world, hungry and alone, and all the evidence (that she currently knows) points toward her being abandoned there as a young child, but she still somehow is full of hope. Experience may have taught her to be distrustful, but she desperately wants to trust, to believe there’s someone she can trust. Above all, she seeks a sense of belonging, both physically and within her own identity, and hope can easily become denial when you’re desperate enough. And, well, 14 years of isolation can make a person pretty desperate.

Since Rey’s first inclination is to latch onto specific people in an attempt to gain that sense of belonging, we’ll start with a section I call Rey And Relationships. Growing up as essentially a feral street child in a junkyard means Rey’s interpersonal skills are... stunted, to say the least. The result is that she has a tendency to lump people into very broad categories, and she struggles with any sort of nuance. There are:

1. People she HATES who are BAD and she will FIGHT THEM
2. People who are scenery about whom she doesn’t really give a single crap but MAY FIGHT if they fight her first
3. People who are FRIENDS/FAMILY/FRAMILY who are GOOD and TRUSTWORTHY and there’s no need to question that literally ever shut up SHE WILL FIGHT YOU.

Now, just as a quick detour, you may notice a few mentions of fighting in those categories. There’s a reason for that. Rey grew up in a hostile environment by herself. She is blunt, rough, a fierce fighter, and can be bad-tempered—fighting has long been a matter of survival for her, so aggression comes bubbling to the surface pretty easily, both physically and verbally. When BB-8 says Finn has a jacket similar to Poe Dameron’s, she immediately attacks him and puts him on the ground. She solves a problem with the hyperdrive in the Falcon by simply ripping a problematic part off of the control panel. Her first instinct upon waking up as a restrained prisoner of a terrifying man with mystical powers is to call him a “creature,” and when she sees the same man mysteriously in her isolated island hut even though there’s absolutely not logical way he could be there, the first thing she does is to try and shoot him. My point is she’s not graduating from charm school anytime soon.

Okay, back to relationships. The biggest problem (there are several) with Rey’s system is, again, the lack of wiggle room for nuance, and while it holds up more or less in The Force Awakens, in The Last Jedi Rey’s way of labeling people as simply as possible falls apart completely. Luke Skywalker… doesn’t really seem to like her all that much, and he’s more of a grumpy sad old man than a majestic badass hero ready to grab a laser sword the minute somebody mentions “hey, the galaxy is in danger”. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren isn’t some evil heartless monster in a scary mask who happens to also have a dumb soft boy face that she’s just tried to ignore before now because he’s supposed to be bad and bad people shouldn’t have dumb soft boy faces that’s so rude. Ren is a particularly special case, and in a vain attempt to categorize him in the simplistic ways she prefers, Rey actually flips all the way to the other end of the Care/Trust spectrum, to the point of idealizing Ben Solo as some noble hero trapped in his goth phase who just needs a good pep talk (and possibly a smidge of flirting in an elevator). Spoilers: he isn’t, and Rey struggles with Ren’s conflicted nature almost as much as he does. Rey never truly adjusts entirely out of her categorizing system, but she becomes more comfortable with it being a sliding scale rather than boxes. (Though Kylo Ren/Ben Solo carves out his own category, and it’s called “Cosmically linked angry man with great hair and bad life decisions she maybe wants to kiss/stab”.)

And in case you’re wondering why I spent so much time talking about how Rey thinks of other people, it’s because Rey, having little concept of her own individuality, tends to build her own identity based on the people she latches onto. She spends most of her story jumping from one self-assigned role to the next, trying to find the one where she truly fits. (Well, I say “jumping.” But it’s more like “Rey gets dragged kicking and screaming into something that challenges her worldview, at which point she makes up a new role for herself.” Rey is about as well-adjusted emotionally as you’d expect from someone with her background.) These roles are often riddled with self-imposed rules and limitations for herself, mainly because she’s retrofitting them around an existing person. Any unexpected events (sudden Force visions/powers/heart-to-heart chats with shirtless villains) or behaviors from the objects of her attachment (see above section about Rey And Relationships) can cause her to completely wig out and do crazy things like run blindly into a forest or break a lightsaber in half instead of just... having a conversation.

First she’s the Jakku Scavenger Whose Family Will Return, until Finn chooses to come back for her on Starkiller base, at which point he becomes Family Redux. Then she gives herself the role of Some Nobody Who Goes To Get The Big Hero And Also Has Some Spooky Magic Powers. In this role, she attempts to find her place retrieving but not being the hero needed by the Resistance (because she’s a nobody from Jakku), while acknowledging that she has these scary powers now and probably should do something with them. It’s not until both Luke Skywalker and Ben Solo fail to be the heroes she hoped they’d be that she’s forced to change herself once again. This time she’s made herself the Jedi Who Should Save The Galaxy But Can’t Because It’s Just A Lot Of Pressure And Also She Kinda Has A Complicated Relationship With The Villain Now, and that’s where her current canon point leaves her.

This particular role is the one Rey struggles with most of all, because it’s the first time she hasn’t had someone to use as a template or an anchor. She’s left to deal with a lot of different complicated feelings, and she has few people to talk to about them in the Resistance. The result is that the temper I mentioned earlier comes out more strongly. She wants to prove herself as the hero she feels she needs to be and feels the galaxy’s eyes on her, and any moment she spends not actively and visibly saving the galaxy fills her with frustration and stress, which often manifests itself as aggression the minute she has an outlet. In the Allegiance comics, she spends her time fighting random monsters and derailing diplomatic missions by constantly trying to fight anyone who isn’t immediately friendly. It’s a pattern she continues up to and into The Rise of Skywalker, but that my friends is a story for another time. Like maybe next month.

Abilities:

• Piloting - Rey claims to be an expert pilot from her first appearance, even though most of her flying experience on Jakku was from simulations.


• Mechanic skills - As a scavenger, Rey is experienced with building or repairing various mechanical items/vehicles out of scraps. I wouldn’t say she’s a master engineer or anything, but she can cobble together some garbage into something that probably works.


• Combat skills - Rey was a skilled brawler on Jakku with her quarterstaff, enough that she claimed to have won more fights than she lost during her time as scavenger.


• Force Abilities - Rey has had about 1.5 Force lessons and has been reading a bunch of old Jedi books in canon and had a handful in Emp when she was here before, so she’s fairly skilled. Overall, Rey seems to have a knack for picking up new skills quickly and using them to great effect, though she’s decidedly lacking in finesse.


• Lifting rocks Telekinesis - she’s pretty good at this. Like “lifting 30 giant boulders without breaking a sweat” good.


• Mind trick - influencing the thoughts of others using the Force, only works on “weak-minded” individuals. (Mostly I assume by default that all player characters are not going to count as “weak-minded.”)


• Lightsaber/combat stuff - her lightsaber is still currently broken (though she will have the broken pieces with her) but she’s still good at using them and also just at fighting in general I guess. Blah blah blah heightened reflexes aid in combat etc etc Force attunement yada yada.


• Force Skype??? - she doesn’t really have control over this, other than some ability to shut it out, but she and Kylo Ren have a freaky Force connection that occasionally kicks in and allows them to see and hear each other, as well as make physical contact, no matter how far apart they may be in reality. The Rise of Skywalker shows it’s possible for them to initiate these connections, though Rey doesn’t currently know how.


• Mind probe - Rey is able to dig through people’s minds and theoretically get information from them. She only does this in reaction to Kylo’s mind probe, however, and she hasn’t canonically attempted it in any other circumstances.

Alignment: Peromei. Rey’s story ultimately boils down to her belief that there must be somewhere she belongs and a family for her, and she sinks to some pretty low places when she encounters roadblocks on that journey. Also, just… I mean. Come on. She’s a Star Wars protagonist. Do you know how many times hope is mentioned in those movies? It’s a lot of times.

Other:



⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉

General Sample: Test Drive

Emotion Sample: I have a few other parts of my test drive thread I can use here if you want more


Questions: Nope!