vivisected

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Siri
OOC Journal:

hearyourghost
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope.
Email + IM: hopeforrent[at]gmail | coolercouleur (AIM + Plurk)
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Caleb St. Clair + Gibson

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: DJ
Canon: Event Horizon
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Right after the Smith incident.
Number: RNG me up.

Setting:

one (1) wiki page

History:

We know exactly three things about DJ's past: he is some flavor of British, most likely Northern Irish, according to his accent and the flag patch on his uniform; he is or has been married at some point, since he wears a wedding ring; and he had massively traumatic surgery as a small child that involved opening up his entire torso, leaving him with a massive scar that runs from his collarbone to his bellybutton. We do not, however, actually know his full name.

Moving on to the actual plot of Event Horizon!

Once upon a time, an Australian astrophysicist named William Weir designed a FTL engine that basically works by punching holes in the space-time continuum and using those to slingshot a ship through a black hole to a new destination. The engine gets installed in a ship (also designed by Weir) and is sent off on a maiden voyage to go investigate the nearest solar system, mainly to see if the gravity drive even works. Unfortunately, the Event Horizon vanishes in transit and is assumed lost—either crushed to death by the gravitational forces inside the black hole or simply knocked fatally off-course. (The official story is that it very tragically exploded en route to Neptune.) Seven years later, the Event Horizon's location beacons were picked up by a satellite outside Neptune's orbit. The only transmission sent by the ship after its reappearance was a very staticky ~~hellspeak~~ transmission. Oh, and the entire ship is shaped like an upside-down crucifix, in case things needed to be even creepier.

Obviously someone's got to investigate, right? Right.

That's where DJ—and the rest of the crew of the USAC Lewis and Clark—comes in. The Lewis and Clark is a search and rescue vessel, run by a motley crew of seven Brits and Americans, and its current orders are to take Weir to Neptune in order to investigate the sudden reappearance of the Event Horizon. Nobody on the Clark's crew is exactly thrilled about this new assignment, since they were pulled off of scheduled leave in order to go to the middle of goddamn nowhere, but they still end up going. This is, unsurprisingly, a really bad idea. Weir briefs the Clark's crew on what exactly happened on the Event Horizon. DJ also manages to identify the language in the Event Horizon's last transmission, saying that the only recognizable bits of language in the jumble of hellspeak are the words "liberate me", or "save me". ~~Apparently no one else in the entire solar system speaks Latin in 2047.~~

The Clark makes it safely to Neptune and docks on the Event Horizon. The readings from Miller, Peters, and Justin—the captain, med tech, and engineer of the Lewis and Clark respectively—go and investigate. The rest of the crew, including DJ, remain on the Clark in order to monitor the explorers' progress and mount a rescue attempt if necessary.

While on the Event Horizon, Miller runs across a really creepy medbay designed by someone with no actual idea of how to comfort (or heal) people but with a pretty good sense of Things That Are Terrifying. Peters goes to check out the bridge, finding a CD with the final captain's log on it—and also an eyeless, mutilated floating dead body, which is presumably the remains of the previous captain of the Event Horizon. (DJ attempts to diagnose his cause of death via video feed, but the body shatters before he can do much beyond say "well, those eyes weren't missing due to decompression, that's for sure".)

Meanwhile, Justin walks through a meat grinder and finds a room full of spikes and a really ominous-looking circular thing. (Ostensibly, the engine room is designed this way to minimize magnetic interference on the gravity drive; in real life, it's mostly there just to look creepy and make us all question Weir's design sense.) The gravity drive starts spinning up, cutting off all communication with the Lewis and Clark with Justin still inside the engine room. Naturally, touches the mysteriously-activated gravity drive and ends up sucked into the opened gravity drive, rendering him catatonic. The gravity drive also somehow emits a huge shockwave while activated, surging through the Event Horizon and seriously damaging the Lewis and Clark's hull, forcing the rest of the crew onboard the Event Horizon.

When the Clark's crew gets onboard, everything is fine and dandy. No, really. All vital systems, save for the carbon dioxide scrubbers and any sort of long-distance communication system, are green. The convenient disappearance of the crew—and sudden presence of gore everywhere and weird readings all over the ship—must all just be a coincidence. The rest of the crew does some exploring, find the captain's last video log (conveniently full of static) … and the crew keep seeing very realistic hallucinations of their greatest fears and regrets. Only Miller's, Weir's, and Peters' hallucinations are actually shown onscreen, but it's a reasonable assumption that DJ is also affected; for the purposes of this app, I'm going to go with Jason Isaacs' theory that DJ hallucinated versions of himself sliced open along his scar, foreshadowing his eventual death.

DJ attempts to rationalize it all by saying that excess CO₂ in the atmosphere can cause hallucinations, but he's clearly just as rattled by the visions as everyone else on the ship. Smith, the pilot, is the only one to realize that "this ship is fucked" and actually say so. Unfortunately, he chooses to express his unease with being on the Event Horizon by attacking Weir and Miller, forcing DJ to stop Smith by getting him in a headlock and then putting a scalpel to his jugular. (How does he know how to do that? We have absolutely no idea—and apparently the rest of the crew doesn't know either, given the looks they're giving DJ during all of this. Basically, we can only assume that there's some backstory in here that got skipped over somewhere.)

Starck, the Lewis and Clark's XO, theorizes that the ship is actually alive, having brought back some sort of lifeform from the travel dimension, and that the hallucinations are a violent, almost immunological reaction to their presence on the ship. (She is actually 100% correct on this count. More on that later.)

Justin, who ended up actually going through the gravity drive and into the dimensional wormhole when he touched the activated drive, wakes from his coma and attempts to commit suicide via airlock in order to forget what he's seen while inside the travel dimension. Peters, the crew's medical technician-slash-mother figure attempts to talk Justin down from the other side of the airlock door, but it doesn't work; Justin ends up activating the airlock, and Miller has to forcibly push him back inside the ship. This doesn't end well for Justin, as his blood vessels and eyeballs spontaneously explode ~~despite what DJ said earlier about decompression and exploding eyeballs~~, putting him out for good. He's still alive, thanks to DJ and Peters' frantic work, but he ends up back in a gravity couch in order to stabilize him.

(Meanwhile, Weir is slowly getting possessed by the entity inside the Event Horizon, and Miller is getting fed up with Weir's attempts at avoiding questions like "what the fuck is going on" and "what other dimension does the ship run through".)

DJ and Miller have a quick heart-to-heart near the gravity couches, wherein Miller reveals that the ship is apparently reading their minds—and DJ mentions that he might have mistranslated the Latin transmission. It's actually "liberate tutemet ex inferis", which is a very creatively-translated version of "save yourselves from hell". DJ stops just short of implying that the Event Horizon actually flies through hell itself when it's making its magic space-time jumps, but Miller is more willing to accept it as a semi-reasonable explanation.

At this point, the Clark's crew is pretty much playing Good News/Bad News. Good news: Cooper and Smith manage to fix the giant gash in the Clark's hull by this point, and everyone assumes they're going to be on their way home very shortly!

Bad news: Peters and Starck manage to unscramble the captain's final video log—and then immediately wish they hadn't. It's pretty much a frenzy of quick cuts of sex and violence, starting with a crew member pulling out his own stomach through his throat and ending with the captain showing the camera the eyeballs he clawed out of himself while saying "liberate tutemet ex inferis" and grinning.

After that little video adventure, everyone splits up to prep for the move back to the Clark, despite Weir's vehement protests. Eventually Weir reveals himself to be totally batshit and mostly possessed by the entity inside the Event Horizon, which kickstarts most of the Bad Things. Peters falls to her death, lured by the hallucination of her son. Weir starts seeing vivid hallucinations of his wife Claire, who essentially forces him to claw his own eyes out. (It's strongly implied that Claire is actually the Event Horizon, but it's never outright stated.) Weir also rigs the Clark to explode, killing Smith and launching Cooper out into space.

Miller calls DJ, telling him that the Clark is gone and warning him about Weir's sudden slide into insanity, ordering him to take Weir out if he sees him.

DJ agrees—and then promptly gets thrown across a room and vivisected by Weir, who seems to know an awful lot about human anatomy for an astrophysicist.

Yeah, Event Horizon is not a movie full of happy endings.

Personality:

DJ is first introduced to the viewer as, essentially, a grim, taciturn fun-hater, and… well, first impressions aren't necessarily wrong. DJ doesn't talk much, his default expression is somewhere in the neighborhood of :|, and he points out the most pessimistic view of events like it's his job. Despite this, however, he's somehow managed to develop a rapport with the rest of the crew of the Lewis and Clark, and apparently is old friends with Miller, the ship's captain. He tries to take care of the rest of the crew as best he can, giving Justin insulin injections and giving Smith cigarettes when absolutely necessary. (Okay, maybe that doesn't qualify as taking care of the crew, but it's a vaguely friendly gesture, even if DJ pretty much throws it at Smith's head.) He's also brusque, but not entirely unfriendly, with Weir when he gets into a gravity couch for the first time. It's not that he doesn't care about other people; he's just got an awful bedside manner.

For the most part, DJ is the most resolutely sensible person on the Lewis and Clark's crew, especially during emergencies of a medical nature. When Justin shuts himself inside an airlock and attempts to commit suicide via depressurization, Peters frantically attempts to talk Justin down and Starck tries to open the airlock during the thirty seconds of countdown between activation of the airlock and death by space. DJ, on the other hand, just tells Justin to "open the fucking door"—and then immediately goes to get the nearest emergency kit. This entire situation is going to end badly, and he knows it, but he's damn well prepared to do something about it. He's also the first person to try and calm Peters down whenever she breaks into a panic—which, quite frankly, happens a lot more than it should in this movie—and he's more than willing to try and take Weir out by any means necessary ~~including bonesaw~~ after it becomes obvious that he's trying to kill them all. (Apparently primum non nocere doesn't mean much when you're dealing with a sentient, murderous spaceship that has literally been to Hell and back.)

Despite his cool exterior, however, he's not totally unflappable in the face of immense psychological pressure from a dimension that may or may not be Hell. The Event Horizon is capable of showing people their worst fears, regrets, and nightmares, and DJ is no exception to the barrage of visions. Despite initially seeming unaffected by the ship's mindfuckery, DJ eventually snaps after a couple of hours on the ship and ends up physically threatening Smith in a moment of extreme stress. Although this is a rather extreme reaction under the circumstances, it's pretty indicative of his normal response to stress. DJ tends to compartmentalize until he physically can't any more, and then he lets it all out in one very calm, very drastic action—and then he's back to normal again. (See: almost slitting Smith's throat with a scalpel, having a quick moment of PTSD, and then being back to almost-normal in the next scene.) It's not the healthiest method of dealing with stress, but it works well enough for DJ.

DJ is pretty much the closest thing the crew of the Lewis and Clark has to an "intellectual"; he's a physician who apparently speaks Latin as a second language, and he can be found doing various forms of Science (and not talking) in the background of quite a few scenes. As a result, DJ is really the only crew member (besides Weir, who's gone off the deep end long before this point) to cling to rational explanations for the Event Horizon's behavior. He insists that the ship is just a "big hunk of metal", even while Smith is actively going after Weir, and despite Miller's willingness to accept traveling through a hell dimension as an explanation for everything that's happened so far, DJ stops just short of confirming or denying that they're on a hellship. He's a scientist at heart, and he firmly believes that there's some kind of reasonable explanation for the hallucinations and the crazy aboard the Event Horizon.

Unfortunately for him, there isn't.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

TRAUMA DJ is a fully trained medical doctor working on a search-and-rescue vessel, specializing in emergency medicine with subspecialties in space medicine and what he describes very succinctly as "trauma". Basically, he's a space paramedic, and he's really damn good at his job. (He's also presumably got some general astronaut training and experience with zero-g as a result of his job, although he's probably the last choice for any sort of space jump.)
COOL-HEADED This is semi-related to the above trait, but on a crew full of people trained to be really good in emergency situations, DJ is probably among the best. (The other candidate for "best" is Starck, who is pretty much the quintessential British stiff-upper-lip attitude wrapped up in a tiny blonde package.) He's not completely unflappable—see: the Smith incident—but he's very, very good at keeping calm and carrying on in emergencies.

STABBABLE DJ's only human, and he dies ~~gruesomely~~ just like everyone else.
HELLSHIP DJ's only spent a few hours on the Event Horizon, and it's already starting to rattle him. Chances are pretty good that he'll be a little on-edge when he first wakes up on the Tranquility.
SKEPTICISM DJ really likes to cling to rational explanations for things. The ship—and its inhabitants—are going to throw him for a loop, which he will promptly try to explain with real-life science.
CIGARETTES Come on, DJ. You're a doctor. You have got to understand the dangers of being a smoker while living on a spaceship.

LIMITATIONS n/a. Normal squishy human here.

Inventory:

one (1) ~~dorky EMS vest~~ utility waistcoat
one (1) spare jumpsuit, in hideous orangey-brown
one (1) emergency space medicine kit
one (1) pack of cigarettes, mostly full
one (1) wedding ring
one (1) USAC ID, which somehow still manages to not contain his full name
one (1) massive scar, located on torso

Appearance:

Jason Isaacs doing his best sternface. DJ is 5'10" and a bit, with short black hair and blue-green eyes. The most notable thing about his appearance is probably the giant scar running down his torso from neck to navel, which tends to be just a little bit visible at all times.

Age: