Application- Animus

[hellacious]

Player Information

Name: Nayru
Personal Journal: caffeinate
Age: 26
Contact Info: [AIM] handcuffHabit | timegame
Other Characters Played: [AU1] Chidori Yoshino

Character Information

Character Name: Sis Strider
Character Series: Homestuck.
Character Age: Older than she looks- but probably in her 30s somewhere.
Character Gender: A motherfucking lady. Female

Alternate Universe
Canon Point: Post-death.
Background Link: Bro @ the MSPA Wiki.
AU Background: Your name is SIS STRIDER and ever since you can remember, you’ve had nightmares.

Not just any nightmares though- yours tended to alternate between visions of your own death (you knew it was you only because you saw it through your own eyes) and the end of the world, decimation coming in the form of meteor upon meteor from the sky.

Growing up with them was hard- it was hard and nobody understood, not even the ‘parents’ that had so dutifully taken such good care of you, had been so proud of you when you turned out to be a ‘prodigy’- their little genius. They gave you everything they thought you wanted (mostly a lot of things you didn’t) and the best education a girl could ask for. You’ve always known what you’d eventually have to do though, and because of it you were always quiet, always slightly withdrawn, not attaching yourself to your ‘family’ any more than you needed to. Even back then, cool detachment was a strong suit of yours- you didn’t go out of your way to be friendly or unfriendly to those you grew up around- you simply were.

Sometimes though- sometimes you had dreams, and in those dreams, things you were meant to do, places you were meant to go and people you were meant to meet tended to come up. They weren’t always easy to understand, and sometimes you didn’t even bother trying- but you always, always, knew they were right, one way or another.

When you graduated though, you pretty much fell off the face of the Earth. Your savings accounts never knew what hit ‘em (money used to be so much easier to fuck around with) and neither did your parents, since you left nothing more than a note that said ‘Thanks for everything, you’ll understand eventually’. Except you knew they wouldn’t. They’d never understand, but that was probably for the best- ignorance is bliss and all that bullshit, right? Now- what you did between that day and the day you arrived at that record store to discover Dave sitting in that crater is a mystery to everyone- and you would rather it stayed that way for reasons you won’t divulge. Shit is complicated, too complicated- but needless to say that in your travels you ran into some people that you were always meant to know- though not to say you wanted to know them, when it came to some.

After Dave though, your life pretty much revolved around taking care of and providing for that newly-acquired charge- a task to which you took with a single-minded sort of intensity. The two of you weren’t rich by any means (not at first, at least), but they weren’t lacking either, your savvy with technology helping you to set up websites to make a pretty penny off of chumps with too much money and not enough social skills. Those alongside part-time jobs were more than enough to keep the both of you going at first, and to provide you with the beginnings of the small arsenal that would eventually reside in the Strider household.

When Dave was old enough to attend school, you started supplementing the income from the websites with a slightly more steady job DJing, leaving him with sitters until you thought he was old enough to stay at home by himself. At that point, Dave was beginning to become a rather self-sufficient little net-ninja in his own right, and you pretended not to notice when your little brother suddenly had more disposable income than a boy his age should. If the kid had game, why the hell not let him run it? Your gigs became more frequent and more distant, and you began to see less and less of Dave when you weren’t sparring with him or teaching him a lesson vital to his future survival. And while that worked out fine enough, you weren’t ever really too happy about it. But you knew, of course, that he’d have to get used to not having you around eventually- and why not sooner rather than later, right?

Still, just because you didn’t often let Dave see you didn’t mean you didn’t take every opportunity to see him, flickering and flash-stepping through the house to move things around and keep him on his toes. Maybe if you’d been around more, he’d have been a more sociable kid- but ‘sociable’ wasn’t going to help him any in the Medium- besides, he had all the friends he’d ever need in the other Players, why would he need anyone else? Codependency has no place with Striders- but you think you might have messed up in that regard just a little.

Your name is SIS STRIDER, and you are taking part in the END OF THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT.

To be honest, you’ve always been meant to help it happen. Funny how it’s not some big biblical apocalypse or natural disaster- though the meteors sure make it seem like it could be either. No, the end of the world is happening because of a game- a game you’ve been training your little brother to win. You won’t have much effect on the outcome- as his GUARDIAN you can only do so much- it’s his job as a PLAYER and as the KNIGHT OF TIME to make this shit happen.

That doesn’t mean you’re not going to do anything you can to make it easier on him and the other players- his three best friends.

In the end, that turns out to be taking on the session’s unforeseen Big Bad with a self-prototyped version of your little brother from a doomed timeline. It’s almost fucking poetic. The two of you work as a unit in a way you know Alpha Dave won’t be able to match for a while still- and while that fills you with pride it also worries you more than you’ll ever admit. But even a united Strider front can’t handle it when the last prototyping of the session happens, and the already nightmarish thing you’d been fighting becomes the thing your real nightmares have always been made of. You don’t back down, and neither does Davesprite, and while you both know it’s a mistake, it’s not one either of you cares much about, because it’s necessary.

Your name is SIS STRIDER and your job is done.

Personality: Sis is pretty badass- she’s calm, collected and cool at all times, sometimes infuriatingly so, never really deigning to react to things outside of a raised eyebrow or the odd upward or downward tilt of her lips. She tends to be smug and overall self-satisfied, very much aware of how talented, attractive and overall incredible she is. While most of the time it can be (and uh, usually is) irritating as Hell, Sis is also irrevocably charming when she needs to be. Usually, however, she finds that being as straightforward and blunt as possible actually suits her best, and she’s not really one much for sugarcoating anyway. She isn’t afraid of much either- hell the girl uses live steel and owns a rocket board- so it stands to reason that the things that scare most people barely faze her. She’s pretty smart-mouthed too, always ready with a witty retort or a sharp barb to counter anything thrown her way (disclaimer: the mun makes no guarantees that she is this witty). She has a bit of a mischievous streak, prone to playing pranks on her younger brother whenever the urge strikes- which is often- and using the cameras hidden around the apartment for various ‘other’ reasons to capture the incidents.

Speaking of her younger brother, Sis is (in her own, oftentimes roundabout way) fiercely protective of Dave, despite the fact that she pretty much beats the shit out of him on a regular basis in the form of ‘training’. The sibling rivalry Dave thinks they share is her way of preparing for what she knows is coming when SBURB happens, and isn’t actually an effort to one-up him in any manner. She doesn’t really need to, honestly- Dave’s good, but Sis will always be better, and she knows it. That doesn’t stop her from ‘encouraging’ him to try and beat her though- but it does make her conscious of the fact that she’s so aware of Dave’s shortcomings because she cares more about him than she’d care to admit. Caring isn’t really a thing that Striders are supposed to express, or at least that’s what Sis has always tried to impress upon Dave, her incredible poker face usually keeping her from showing very much emotion at all. Detachment, nonchalance; those are paramount to interaction between the Strider siblings- though in all honesty, Sis has grown just a little more lax in that regard the closer it gets to Game Time. Just because she won’t often show it though doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it, and Dave is actually her main motivator for all the things she’s had to learn and do, and while some might take that to mean she doesn’t like it, that’s just not true. The things she’s had to do for Dave have never been a burden, and while they haven’t always been easy to do, she’s done them readily and without qualm.

Even if those things aren’t always likely to end well.

Despite the impression she sets out to give, the elder Strider is a very meticulous, careful person when it comes to most things. She plans everything she does to exacting degrees, and though she knows to always account for a chance of failure, she’s not the type to let herself think too hard on what might happen if she gets things wrong. It might make her seem irrational if anyone was to ever become aware of it, but she prefers to think of it as keeping her eyes on the prize. Backing up that carefulness is a very sharp mind, though she downplays it as much as possible- not even Dave knows the extent to which his guardian is capable of planning, scheming and executing things, and she really prefers it that way. And while Dave thinks of her as the coolest, smoothest sibling in existence (and while the fact is not entirely untrue) he is, unfortunately, a little blinded by his admiration for his sister.

You see, under all that swag and self-control, Sis is actually kind of… strange. Unsociable in some ways, but not in others. She has an easier time interacting with inanimate objects- Lil’ Cal, her smuppets, stuffed animals even- than she does with normal people. Not to say she doesn’t do it well when the need calls for it, but it’s not without a lot of internal commentary and unease- as stated in her history, she was never much for keeping herself ‘close’ to people, and while she knows how to manipulate and lead them, actually interacting with them? A bit harder to do. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, of course, but that doesn’t mean she’s not more comfortable talking to someone from the safety of a messaging system or a text message than she is with talking to them in person. She’ll manage it well enough, of course, but the difficulty will be there- she’ll just do her best not to be obvious about it, and she’ll usually do just fine with that. Thankfully, she’s pretty good under pressure and adept at keeping her cool even when she’s stressing out internally, so she doesn’t often have a problem with people catching on that she just doesn’t know how to handle all their… emotions.

So messy, those things.

Overall, though she’s just a Guardian who is especially good at what she does- and what she does is train Knights, spit rhymes and kick ass, though not necessarily in that order.

Well, that and troll Dave. But I mean really, who doesn’t enjoy that every once in a while?
 

Abilities: + Flashstepping- Sis is fast enough to use Lil’ Cal to fight Dave while only leaving a vague shadow of herself to be seen.

+ Ridiculous strength- She cut a meteor in half with a ninja sword and nothing else. Girlfriend is legit.

+ Combat skills- Sis is possessed of the ‘bladeKind’ strife specibus- which pretty much means if it’s got a blade, she can fuck your shit up with it. However, she’s also proficient with throwing weapons and using puppets (specifically, Lil Cal) in combat, and can and will switch between them at will at any given point in a fight. When she really wants to mess you up though, she sticks to a fairly basic ninjato and Lil Cal in tandem- though she has no problem sacrificing Cal for the sake of a fight.

+ Poker Face of Steel- This woman can say pretty much anything like it’s God’s own truth and still come off as the smoothest motherfucker on the planet no matter how ridiculous what she’s saying sounds.

+ Sylladex- Like most characters in Homestuck, Sis has a Sylladex in which she stores items. She can store anything in there. Anything.
>>>>>>>+ Sis has actually weaponized her Sylladex- she and Dave both have the Hash modus, and both employ the use of strategic phrasing in their battles to launch the (usually sharp as shit) contents of their Sylladices at each other.

Sample Entry: Floor forty-two.

She’d had to count to make sure it was right, but forty-two it was, going by the tower’s wonky directionally-challenged layout. The bars that stretched out from the side of the staircase were thin, and didn’t look too sturdy- in other words, perfect for training. She took a step onto the nearest one, peering down between the bars to the spikes that lay in wait below. A little more challenging, now that she realized they were there- but still, nothing that couldn’t be handled easily enough. She rocked back on her heel once, twice, and then bounded forward along the bar, not even bothering to really test if the sudden weight and movement would prove too much for it. It proved to be sturdy enough to hold her at her top speed before she hit flashstep territory, and she paused in the middle of one bar, satisfied-

Then the bar she was standing on jerked and began moving out from beneath her, and it took her almost a millisecond too long to locate a nearby bar to retreat to. That didn’t last long, and she had to retreat to another as she noticed that the bars were reconfiguring themselves in a way that wouldn’t let her get near the stairs until they decided to move again. If they decided to move again.

Now this was good training.

It took a lot of jumping, flash-stepping and toward the end, swinging, but she managed to launch herself from the last of the moving bars with just enough time and distance between them to grab the edge of the staircase with one hand. Pulling herself up wasn’t too difficult, and she turned to watch the bars reconfigure themselves at angles and directions that would have made it hard to keep herself alive out there for too much longer if she hadn’t made it to the stairs. She stood, dusting off her hands, and tensed at the sound of someone coming up the stairs in the opposite direction she’d intended to head, and froze for a moment- and then promptly bolted past them, quiet as a shadow- just one more thing in the corner of their eye to freak them out about the tower.

Comments

Revisions: Differences

[hellacious]

As far as being different from her canon self, the differences between Sis and Bro are, at first, minor and mostly superficial- because let's face it, no self-respecting Strider would let gender be more of a determining factor in who they are than it needs to be. Not if they could help it.

But for starters, where Bro seems to pattern his behaviors to make Dave think of him as a seriously rad gamer bro who is, of course, infinitely better at them than he is, Sis is only somewhat interested in them instead of trying to give into the standard gamer grrl stereotype. Where Bro is distant and gives Dave room to learn to fend for himself so he can handle the game, Sis does it for not only his benefit, but also to try and keep herself from getting more attached than she is.Where Bro torments Dave with smuppets at any given opportunity, Sis mainly uses them to hedge him in the direction of doing things she wants/needs him to do- whether that be taking care of himself or starting up a Strife. As far as the puppets go, Sis isn't nearly so obsessed with them, if only because as a female, she's well aware of how their... questionable shape and appendages could be misconstrued.

She's actually probably a little colder than Bro in general because of her gender as well, simply because being too open around people outside of work hazards advances she doesn't want or need. She's no super-feminist, but she never cottoned on to the thought that there were things women couldn't do just because they were women- but she's also got enough sense to realize that sometimes it's best to know when to push a point and when not to. At least, where anyone might be able to call the police on the results. Of course, she's had to go harder and be better, faster, stronger than her male competition in everything she does, so she doesn't take kindly to chivalry in the slightest. In fact, she more or less has an aversion to anything that might mean she'll come out looking weaker than any male, and she'll usually take competitions with them to somewhat ridiculous levels.

Granted, that doesn't mean she's never used what she's got to her advantage, but she's usually not the kind to resort to it sincerely. At most, she teases people with her looks, but she's never really sincere about that either. She does, however, tend to take advantage of the fact that she's female to allow her love of puppets to sort of seep into an admiration for most anything stuffed and adorable- though it's hard to get her to cop to it on a good day. Cute things in general are sort of a weakness, but she plays it off for the irony, as Striders are wont to do. When in doubt, act like it's ironic, and she doesn't ever expect anyone to question it if and when she says it.

Also it's minor, but instead of shitty swords in the fridge, they tended to be in the cupboards. The fridge was filled with throwing weapons that launched themselves at Dave when he went looking for things to eat- because Sis does like to have food around that she can cook on occasion. Even if her definition of 'cooking' is 'shove it in the microwave' for everything but breakfast.