[App] babylonwood

[shotofdumbidea]

We thought we were bold and we thought we were brave,
We tried to reach out, and lost more than we gave;
We claimed we were masters when we were just slaves...
This is the way that world ends:
Not with a bang and not even a pause
To say what we'd needed to say.

The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: inthemortalcity
AIM/IM: meant to care
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Harry Dresden, Emily Prentiss, and Olivia Dunham

The Character
Character Name: Georgia Mason
Character Journal: shotofdumbidea
Canon: Newsflesh series
Age: 23
From When?: Feed, Chapter 24 - just before she heads into the Senator's reception to tell him about the conspiracy.

Appearance:

• Average height (5'4" or 5'5"?)
• 135 lbs tops
• Short brown hair - she prefers it short enough that she doesn't have to do more than run a comb through it, and if it starts to curl, it is way too long for her. It's also dyed to her natural color, thanks to the bleach in her shower at home; she makes a terrible blonde.
• Wears sunglasses constantly. Yes, even at night, barring special circumstances. She will take advantage of this to watch you when you think she's not looking. Do not try to make her remove them.
• Behind the sunglasses, her eyes are mostly black, with a very thin ring of coppery brown around the dilated pupil. The effect of her stare minus the sunglasses is kind of creepy.
• Small blue and red tattoo on her wrist containing information like her name, social security number, journalist ID number... It's to identify her body if necessary.

Abilities/Powers:

Georgia is a journalist - a much more dangerous profession in her world than in most - and field-certified for almost all situations imaginable. This means that she is trained with most firearms - primarily handguns, but give her a shotgun or rifle or even a crossbow and she'll probably be able to keep herself alive with it - and in good enough physical health that she can run the fuck away when necessary. She is also capable of some truly impressive maneuvers on a dirt bike, given the proper motivation.

As a result of the retinal KA that permanently dilates her pupils, she has stellar low-light vision - not what you'd call catlike, but no other human is going to see in the dark as well as she can. Her eyes don't water, she doesn't need to blink much, and she can't cry. The flipside of this is that light hurts - even when wearing her sunglasses, she's prone to killer migraines, and taking her sunglasses is the fastest way to completely disable her. Exposure to strong lights - which includes normal daylight and indoor lighting - for prolonged periods of time could cause permanent damage to her sight or blind her completely.

Power Limitations:

Not for Georgia, but for Kellis-Amberlee (see the special notes at the end for a general rundown of the virus). In its dormant, "helpful" form, it will only be contagious to people from Georgia's universe - who, unless they're from before the Rising for some reason, will already have it. The live state of the virus, however, will probably still be actively contagious to anyone (or at least the humans here), should that issue arise.

So basically, if George or Shaun turns into a zombie and bites someone, that person could still amplify and become a zombie too, but anyone else who dies without being bitten will stay dead, and no one's going to carry Kellis-Amberlee back home if they ever get there.

Inventory

• Her clothing:
   • Prescription sunglasses
   • Black custom-made dress, puncture-proof, with a breakaway skirt, plus a few hidden pockets and compartments, and probably some hidden cameras and wireless receivers
   • Black shawl
   • Pantyhose made of a puncture-proof polymer
   • A pair of low heels about as tough as combat boots, though harder to run in
   • Black bra and underwear
• Concealed in her bodice:
   • A small handgun containing ten rounds
   • Handheld MP3 recorder
• In the hidden pockets at her waist:
   • Extra ammunition (10 rounds)
   • PDA
   • Wallet containing: California driver's license, journalist credentials, med card identifying her as having retinal KA, personal credit card
• Earcuff phone
• Magnetic clip-on earrings. That are also cameras.
• Watch w/text messaging capabilities (with a tiny foldout keyboard) and a limited recording capacity
• Press access pass for the Ryman campaign
• Three thumb drives containing information on the conspiracy

Personality:

Georgia is a natural journalist - smart, determined, and a born cynic. She makes a point of projecting a particular image to the world at large. She's the hard-hitting reporter of the team, the one who doesn't pull any punches, is absolutely devoted to the truth, and if she has a sense of humor, it's nothing but dry, biting sarcasm. There's a common perception among certain members of the press corps that she sucked up the entire supply of "jaded and cranky" between her and her brother, and now spends her time glowering from behind her sunglasses, gathering facts with which to ruin anyone who might annoy her, and possibly plotting the downfall of the western world. It's not true - mostly - but that kind of a reputation has its uses, so she doesn't really mind.

As a rule, Georgia is not terribly friendly. To anyone. It's not that she doesn't make friends, but if you're not used to her, it might take a while to recognize the relationship as friendship, at least on her end. All her friendships double as working relationships - probably a result of her warped childhood, if you want to look at it that closely (she doesn't) - and she tends to focus on the professional side of the relationship more often than not. Buffy's a "decent friend and a great techie"; Mahir, probably her best friend besides Shaun, is more likely to be regarded as her second in command than as a friend at all; and the highest praise and most affection she tends to show is in telling a friend they did well at their job.

Even when she does get close to someone, she retains a healthy awareness of their faults and weaknesses as well as their good points, and there's always a sense she's keeping them at arm's length - and that's because she is. Georgia's an extremely private person, who doesn't like to show emotion and doesn't even seem to have a personal life because that would mean opening up more than she's comfortable with. The only person who gets past that carefully constructed defence is her brother... and even then, she's more likely to express her affection for him by telling him she hates him and threatening to leave him for the zombies than in any normal fashion.

It's easy to think Georgia doesn't like people, but that's not what it is. Rather, she just has a fairly cynical outlook on human nature - people tend to accept the first easy answer given to them, and act on fear before reason - and she is not particularly surprised when people act according to it. That doesn't mean it doesn't annoy her when people don't bother to look for the right answer, or settle for entertainment value and what's comfortable to hear over the truth. She takes comfort in the fact that she and the people she cares about are smarter than that, and she has a tendency to get judgmental and sometimes just plain bitchy when she thinks someone's being stupid, especially willfully so. On the flipside, it tends to be somewhat of a surprise to her when people do use their brains, so that plus not being a horrible human being can sometimes be enough to earn you a little goodwill from Georgia.

Georgia's a leader almost as naturally as she is a journalist. She's happiest when she can delegate and trust people to handle their jobs without her worrying too much about them, but there's a reason she ended up as administrative head of After the End Times, and a reason that when she gives orders, people listen. She's practical and pragmatic, and very good at organization, with a head for facts and a talent for seeing the bigger picture. What's more, she doesn't panic in a crisis - she just goes cold and rational, expects the worst and plans for it.

Georgia and Shaun were raised to a faith of "tell the truth, know the escape routes, and always carry extra ammunition". That sort of thing is kind of bound to happen with parents like theirs. Knowing the escape routes and carrying extra ammunition are kind of background noise for her - she never forgets, but as far as conscious, active concerns go, she mostly leaves that sort of thing for Shaun to worry about. The part about telling the truth, though, she took to heart maybe more than even her parents intended. She's not really religious in any way, shape, or form, but her devotion to the truth comes damn close.

Telling the truth isn't just important to Georgia, it's her driving purpose in life. That doesn't mean that she's incapable of keeping a secret, or that she's tactless (though you might not know it from her habit of using the truth as a weapon when annoyed), but when it's important enough, there's not a thing in the world that can stop her from making sure the truth gets heard. She believes, above all, people should be allowed to make their own choices and form their own opinions, and doing that requires knowing all the facts. Knowing the whole truth means you don't have to be afraid of what you don't know. Given that, hiding the truth from people, or warping the truth until it's impossible to separate fact from opinion, and forcing people to live in fear is the closest thing to evil she can think of.

The only thing that matters to Georgia as much as the truth is Shaun. Growing up after the Rising means it's not safe to really trust many people - unless you know their personality so intimately that you can tell immediately when something's off, and know for sure they'll tell you if they know something's wrong, trusting other people means gambling with your life every single time, and Georgia's too attached to survival to do that if she can help it. This narrows most people's circle of trust to immediate family, significant others, and, on very rare occasion, extremely close friends. And with Georgia's parents being mostly interested in their children as props for ratings, the only person she really trusts is her brother.

In another time and place, their relationship would be described as unhealthily codependent - as it is, it's a survival mechanism, though still regarded by some people as a little creepy and questionable, even in their world. She can't sleep when he's not at least in the next room, preferably with the door open so she can hear him. She relies on him to run interference when she can't deal with people, and vice versa, and while she's perfectly capable of handling herself in field situations without him, she's happiest when Shaun's around and watching her back. Shaun being who he is, a part of her has accepted that she's going to lose him - probably some day sooner than either of them is ready for. The rest of her is certain that she won't survive all that long once he's gone, and doesn't want to. In the meantime, all she really wants is to keep reporting the news, telling the truth as best she can, and to be around her brother for as long as she can possibly keep him.

Like most people of her generation, she's got a bundle of issues any sane person is bound to develop in a world where zombies are a constant threat. She's deeply uncomfortable in crowds (which, for her, begins at maybe eight people in one room), though she's much better about that than most people her age, who tend to run screaming from crowds if you can even get them close enough to that many people. Animals over forty pounds - that is, big enough to amplify - are something she regards as potential threats, no matter how well-trained and controlled, and if she can avoid even being in the same general area as animals that big, she will very happily do so. She really dislikes physical contact from just about anyone but Shaun, and she very quickly gets tense and nervous in open spaces, anywhere without clear lines of sight, or any building that's not adequately secured and doesn't require blood tests to get into. Oh, and she believes that a person having obvious open wounds of any kind - even just a scratch - or acting strangely is a valid reason to point a gun at them until they get a blood test. That shouldn't be a problem or anything, right?

History:

In 2014, the world ended.

That is to say, in 2014, the dead started to rise. People were hit by cars, or had heart attacks, or fell off ladders, and then they got back up again and started biting people. And the people they bit soon started to do the same, and before long you had a global outbreak. Entire cities and nations fell, and over thirty percent of the world's population was killed in one summer - and for days while people died, governments and news networks all denied that it was happening.

It was exactly like every zombie movie ever made, and it could have ended the same way, except for one thing: plenty of people had actually seen those movies, and already knew how to fight back. Aim for the head, don't get bitten or let them bleed on you, and generally behave like a human in possession of a functioning brain, because that's the one thing the other side doesn't have - that and bullets. Those who found ways of fighting and killing them spread their knowledge over the internet, through blogs and Youtube videos and any way they could find, too fast and too widespread to be silenced. In the time it took for governments, the CDC and WHO, and mainstream news to get their acts together, the world could have ended - but it didn't, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to both George Romero and the bloggers of the world for that.

Three years after the Rising, two children were born, about six weeks apart. Both were orphaned by zombies, adopted by two bloggers attempting to put their lives back together, and named Shaun and Georgia Mason. The Masons lost their biological son, Phillip Mason, in the Rising - the first confirmed case of animal-to-human transmission of Kellis-Amberlee - and never quite got over that loss.

From the outside, they looked like a happy family, raising their children in the closest thing to a normal life possible post-Rising. The reality was that they were raised as props for photo opportunities - chasing ratings was safer, for their parents, than actually caring about their children. However, the effort of raising Shaun and Georgia as "citizens of the world, not citizens of fear", as their father once put it, meant they got things few children of their generation ever saw - trips to the zoo, the ability to play outdoors (in adequately secured areas), and pets too small for full viral amplification. Though she may not have much affection for her parents, Georgia does appreciate that.

Being brought up that way, Georgia and Shaun never really had a chance when it came to having safe, sane, or what most people post-Rising would call normal lives. She first told her father she wanted to be a journalist when she was sixteen - though she knew what she wanted to do years before that, and probably so did he - and he pulled some strings to get her enrolled in a history of journalism class at the university.

After that, there was pretty much no chance she'd do anything else with her life. She and Shaun got their licenses as soon as they were old enough, found themselves a really good Fictional and techie - Buffy Meissonier - to complete their triple threat, and set themselves up as beta bloggers under the largest news site in the Bay Area, where they worked for almost five years. Being both talented and very ambitious, they always planned to make the jump to alpha bloggers and set up their own site at some point, but they never found a story big enough to ensure they'd bring their audience with them when they moved. And then came the 2040 presidential campaign.

Despite the increasing acceptance and respectability of internet journalism, the press pools for presidential campaigns tended to be fairly conservative - that is to say, television and news reporters, not bloggers. However, Republican frontrunner Senator Ryman was the first presidential candidate who was under 18 at the time of the Rising, and the first to decide that maybe taking a group of bloggers on the campaign trial might not be political suicide.

There was never any question of whether Georgia, Shaun and Buffy would sign up. They rushed Buffy through the necessary qualifications as quickly as possible, applied for the job, and actually got it a few months later. The three of them wasted no time in launching their own site, After the End Times, and hiring on their own staff of beta bloggers. Anyone surprised at the speed at which they managed that obviously hadn't been paying attention - this was the moment Georgia and Shaun had been waiting on for years, and they were going to take full advantage of it.

They hit the campaign trail with Ryman - who, against all odds, had managed to impress even the most cynical of them (read: Georgia) - and the campaign slowly but surely gained momentum. After an event in Eakly, Oklahoma, the convoy was attacked by a pack of zombies. On the face of it, it wasn't that strange, but no alarms went off before the zombies arrived, and the pack was comprised of zombies that couldn't have been dead for more than a few hours, leaving no clear explanation for where the pack came from. When Buffy checked the security system, she found the alarms on the camp had been sabatoged; when George and Shaun checked the footage, they found that one of the guards had taken a bullet to the kneecap, allowing the zombies to breach the fence. The attack at Eakly was no accident: it was attempted murder, and terrorism as well, since the weapon happened to be live-state Kellis-Amberlee in the form of zombies.

With that ominous fact hanging over their heads, the campaign moved on, and by the time the primary came around, Ryman and Governer David Tate were the two Republican frontrunners. Ryman won the primary that night. He was on stage accepting the nomination when the news started to break: an outbreak had started at the Ryman family horse ranch, where the senator's daughters were staying. The younger two girls survived. Rebecca Ryman died, along with her grandparents and several employees at the ranch.

After the funeral, Georgia, Shaun, and Rick, a reporter they'd picked up at the primary, were given permission to investigate the ranch. The idea was that a report from them would keep other, less scrupulous bloggers from trespassing on the ranch to try to find some story for themselves - and Georgia, master of cynicism, had her own suspicions about the timing and improbability of the outbreak, particularly after what they found at Eakly. Her suspicions turned out to be entirely correct: inside the stall where the outbreak most likely started, they found an intact syringe full of live Kellis-Amberlee, along with a second, broken and already used to trigger the outbreak.

They had a chance to leave the campaign after that, head back home and not risk being killed the next time someone took a shot at the campaign. Buffy wanted to go home. Georgia and Shaun, on the other hand, were offended by the very suggestion. Neither of them intended to leave the campaign until the bitter end, whatever that might be, and where they went, Buffy would follow. So they stayed. Looking back, Georgia would regret that choice - but she also wouldn't change it, given the chance.

The next attack came as they drove from Oklahoma to Texas. A sniper took out the tires on Georgia's bike, the van, Rick's car, and the equipment truck Buffy was riding in with her boyfriend, Chuck. Georgia, Shaun and Rick all made it out with nothing more than minor scrapes and bruises. Chuck was killed on impact, and managed to reanimate and bite Buffy before they got her out. Before she died, she told them she had been bugging the campaign, giving information to the people involved with the attacks, though she hadn't known what they would use that information for. She told them how to get into their notes, and through that they learned that Governer Tate, now Ryman's running mate, was involved too.

After that, Shaun and Georgia turned most of the resources of After the End Times toward getting to the bottom of the conspiracy. They couldn't tell Ryman because they couldn't be sure he wasn't in on it, and he was confused and upset by their sudden withdrawal. Weeks of paranoia and crankiness on all sides followed, until finally, when the campaign was in Sacramento, they made a breakthrough. They followed the money and found that Tate was being paid in secret by someone in Atlanta... home of the CDC. Armed with that information, Georgia decided she finally had enough to tell Ryman what they knew - but the Wood intervened before she could get to him.

First Person Sample: In which Georgia registers a public protest, just for the record
Prose Sample:

Shaun's home earlier than Georgia expected. It's still late enough that before long, the only sensible thing to do with the empty cans taking over her desk would be to start building a fort, but last she heard, he'd been planning to crash with his Irwin friends in Salinas, and wasn't supposed to be back at least until a couple hours after the sun rose. The distant sound of the garage security system, followed by Shaun's footsteps thumping up the stairs with absolutely no concern for who he might wake up makes her jump and spin around in her chair just to check if she somehow lost several hours somewhere.

It's still three in the morning according to the alarm clock. There's no sunlight coming through the door between their rooms. He really is home early, then, for no reason she can think of.

She manages to get out of her chair and halfway to the door before Shaun comes barreling in from the hall, and throws his arms around her hard enough to squeeze the breath out of her. She wheezes softly, and then laughs — quietly, because she actually cares about not waking up their parents, albeit for the entirely selfish reason of not wanting to deal with them on this little sleep.

"Well, that was dramatic. What, you just couldn't bear to be away from me for a couple more hours?"

Georgia starts to twist away from him, buying herself just enough room that she can reach up to shove him off her. Her hands hit his shoulders, and she stops, because he's shaking. The muscles under her hands are knotted tight in a way that only comes from hours of fear and tension, he smells like bleach and sweat, and he's still clinging to her, hard.

"...Shaun?"

Special Notes, or A Brief Primer on Kellis-Amberlee:

[Note: Here be spoilers for Deadline (up to page 209). If you care, DO NOT READ THIS SECTION.]

Kellis-Amberlee is a combination of Marburg Amberlee, originally designed to cure cancer, and the Kellis flu, originally designed as a cure for the common cold. In its normal, dormant form, Kellis-Amberlee still does both of those things - no one in Georgia's world gets colds or cancer anymore. It's airborne, as contagious as the common flu, and once you have it, you have it for life - it just stays in the body, waiting.

It's the live version of Kellis-Amberlee that causes a problem. When someone infected with KA dies, the virus amplifies and becomes "live", taking over the host and turning it into... well, a zombie. The virus only has one purpose: to spread itself, which it does by getting its bodily fluids onto open wounds or mucous membranes of living humans. Mostly, this involves biting any living mammals they can reach and bleeding on people if they manage to injure it without killing it, although fresher zombies with fluids to spare have been known to spit and vomit to spread the infection.

When a living human (or, in fact, any mammal over forty pounds) comes in contact with live Kellis-Amberlee, they will then amplify and become a zombie as well. This usually happens within thirty minutes to an hour, but rate of amplification depends on a number of factors, probably most important being body weight, and heart rate at the time of the bite, but as soon as a person is bitten, they become contagious and should not be touched, even if not yet fully amplified. Early signs of amplification include dry mouth and throat, dilated pupils, loss of motor control and sense of pain, confusion and disorientation, and finally the death of the conscious mind, shortly followed by trying to eat your face.

There is no cure for Kellis-Amberlee, and ordinarily, there's no way to stop or reverse amplification. However, in some cases, those who come in contact with very small amounts of live Kellis-Amberlee (usually before they are large enough to amplify) will kennel off the virus in one specific part of their body - it's still live, but it does not send the body into amplification and zombification. These reservoir conditions (like Georgia's retinal KA) teach the body how to fight live Kellis-Amberlee when it encounters it again - not always, not perfectly, but in two in ten thousand cases, someone with a reservoir condition who undergoes amplification can recover. Georgia is one of those two in ten thousand.