Olivia Robins.

the ooc

Name: Rian.
Age: 21.
Email: moc.liamg|4091yawarac#moc.liamg|4091yawarac
AIM: caraway1914.
past experience: All my experience can be found between my journal and my wiki.
hold: hello_from_dis.
character journal: restraint.

the ic

Name: Olivia Jacqueline Robins.
Age/Birthdate: 19/May 1st.
Sexuality: Bisexual, leaning towards women. She can and has been attracted to men before, but usually only shows her ~lesbian side~ in public. Girls are generally nicer about shooting down a crippled chick than guys are. Optimistic, huh?
Alias/Codename: While known in underground international thievery circles as the androgynous, enigmatic 'J' (although not so enigmatic if you know her real name), Olivia has adopted the more innocuous Madame Management (not her choice, and entirely due to her apparent love of filing and post-its; OH HOW IRONIC) for her time in Neopolis. After all, revealing her actual secret identity to the world at large, even a world so insular as Neopolis, is probably bad form for a budding spymaster.

Concept: Take James Bond's Q, Bird of Prey's Oracle, a healthy dose of teenage fail, and put it all in a blender on puree: that is pretty much Olivia. A former junior adventurer — her mother's unhappy associate after the death (murder) of her father — Olivia suffered severe injuries at the hands of a group of rival thieves, looking to outsource and outdo her infamous spy of a mother. Now crippled and prematurely retired from active spywork, Olivia has focused her attentions on the management side of things. After all, behind every network of spies and cutthroats is someone pulling the strings. In twenty years, she'll likely be heading up MI6 or the CIA, but for right now, she's merely the anonymous operator behind an international network of thieves, spies, rogue agents, black-ops, and the occasional minor government contract — all while plowing her way through trade school.

Faculty: Science.
Year: Third.
Skills: Olivia's skill set is not directly science related, but more epistemological in nature. Her primary abilities lie in acquiring and distributing information and situation management. She is, in short, a teenage Head of Operations.
<blockquote>Computer savvy. She's no Binary, or even some of the smarter hackers, but Olivia's job requires a certain degree of encryption and decryption skill, which she has keenly honed over the years. She's well aware her files can and inevitably will be hacked; it's a matter of encrypting them enough to buy her time to destroy them. She has almost zero talent in the writing/editing code or programming area, and certainly minimal talent at gadgetry — she can tinker with things, and occasionally enhance them, but for the most part, leaves that to the real gadgeteers.

Language skills. Raised in upwards of a dozen countries for brief periods of time, Olivia has picked up a multitude of languages. She is only fluent in French, Italian, and Russian (and even then, it's not perfect), but has a reasonable knowledge of Mandarin, Pashto, Arabic, Turkish, Tagalog, Spanish, and German. She's working on Cantonese and Portuguese. It seems like a lot for a 19-year-old, but for nearly a decade, Olivia was required to learn these languages — or she might lose a job, or worse, get shot for being a faulty spy. She taught herself to learn and learn quickly, even if it wasn't perfect. If management doesn't count as a skill set, her linguistic capabilities certainly do.

Filing. It is a skill. She is the best filer in 42 out of 50 states, okay. Don't mess. When you have cyberpaths trolling the internet for any kind of factoid or foxhole, storing data electronically becomes a tricky business. Olivia has instead mastered offline filing — whether it's in actual file cabinets, or in computer documents inaccessible via the internet.

Intelligence. It goes without saying that Olivia is smarter than your average bear. She won't be proposing new theorems of relativity any time soon, but she's more than capable of handling her (somewhat minimal) coarse load and underground network of associates. Most of the time, anyway. God save her roommate come finals.

Hand-to-hand. Which is really just code for being able to beat the hell out of people with her cane. She has some retained muscle memory from the rigorous regimen her mother forced her into, but after the accident, most of her immediate skills atrophied. Her biggest skill (aside from caning) is hand-to-hand disarming — that is, she knows how to take a knife/gun/etc. away from someone. Would have been handy a few years back, but oh well.

Diplomacy and spywork. Outside of Neopolis, anyway, where she's more known as a surly curmudgeon with a penchant for chasing skirts. She retains some of her spy-related skills — blending in, reading people, lockpicking, how to assemble basic explosive devices, etc. — but since she wasn't in the field nearly as often as her mother, and it has been years since she's even attempted further field work, these skills have fallen into disuse. She still retains much of the intellectual aspect of rogue work — spying, stake-outs, information gathering and recon, etc. — though much of it has been filtered into the management arena.

Management. Olivia has a head for planning, and how things work. It extends beyond mere tactical support: she understands how people will react, how her own agents will act in a given situation, how to plan ahead for possible defecting or mishaps, among a dozen other basic team-management techniques. She knows how to find information, who to press for certain facts, how to disseminate information and how much to release for a given mission/operative, and what to do with information give her. She's good at it, and will continue to be good at it. Not too many people know the extent of this particular skill; merely that Olivia seems to excel in team exercises and spends a lot of time with her filing cabinets.</blockquote>

Alliance: ELE. Not so much out of a desire to do evil, than the fact that there is a dearth of underground thieving types aligned with the BHH. Really, she'll take offers for employment from whichever side, whoever is the highest bidder. Which happens to be the ELE, most of the time. …But hey, if some Bruce Wayne billionaire comes along needing an Oracle, she'll be all over that. It doesn't help most of the upstanding BHHers think thievery is just wrong, and that when you get down to it, the governments she is working towards are far more unscrupulous than the BHH would allow.

Personality:

• Sarcastic, dry, blunt. Less about the really clever, esoteric jokes no one will get, than being bluntly insulting. It's much more effective, and since none of these people know her ~true~ identity, she sees no reason to butter up to them. Can be very coarse and flatly ribald (example: "Well, we could argue about this, or you could suck my proverbial dick. Or labia, I guess. …What?"), which aren't so endearing either. Lies extensively, but without any intention of being believed. Often resorts to outrageous deadpan statements (example: "Sure, Van Helsing twins, you can help turn me back to the American way of heterosexuality. While I was in Singapore, I heard of this method where you stare at a pair of breasts until they are no longer desirable to you. And you know, there are no fags there."). This is also an unfortunate coping mechanism for suddenly having to live in and with and near all these teenagers. Olivia lies and bullshits and insults both to keep herself interesting, and to keep her distance.
• As such, she has difficulty getting close to people. She lived almost exclusively with her mother for ten years, and was abruptly dropped back in with her age group at 16, long past the formative years. She'd forgotten how to relate to her peers, and knowing how to blend in only took you so far, especially when you were periodically switching between cane and wheelchair. She often has to think about the proper response, or she'll say something unintentionally alienating or self-centered. Is brash and occasionally needlessly cruel, and often doesn't think about things she says to people until later. Keeps a locked and encryted file on her computer with a list of "proper mannerisms" she's picked up in the past couple years. For example: don't actually tell a girl that yes, she really wasn't good enough for her boyfriend when he's just dumped her. The spy stuff she's got down pat, enough that she isn't going to be breathing heavily into someone's hair any time soon; but she still has some social issues to sort out before she can conduct herself in normal society.
• Unintentionally self-involved. When it was just her and her mother, Lorelai was the only other person Olivia really had to worry about. More often than not, her mother would leave her without any contact at all, meaning Olivia had only to fend for herself: that's translated over into her life in Neopolis. Aside from general survival and self-defense skills, Olivia has rather nasty tendencies to act with only herself in mind. If someone offers her food out of politeness, she will take the lion's share, and eat until she is full. If they invite her to a party she has no wish to attend, she will inform them point-blank why it's ridiculous to even think of inviting her. She rarely offers (pro-bono) help, though is quick to take it when she needs.
• Often more out of frustration that she can't interact properly with her peers, than proper derision for the rest of the school, Olivia comes off needlessly cruel and sarcastic. Think House without the goofiness. There's something of a disconnect in how she interacts: instant social interaction is a trial for her, even beyond "awkwardness." She compensates for her lack of social skills with schadenfreude and casual cruelty. There's enough latent empathy that she'll usually apologize later — or act as if nothing happened, and her cruel remarks were little more than remarks (which, really, is the truth of it; she doesn't always understand why people have to take everything so seriously) — but the initial cruelty is hard to ignore.
• Can also be somewhat condescending. She does think herself professionally superior to many of her peers — they're running around topless in the magic dorms, while she's remotely operating a sting in the Mumbai slums — but she rarely thinks herself personally or morally superior. Olivia has few conventional morals outside of professionalism and being damn good at what she does; she's perfectly aware people are going to be smarter, nicer, and funnier than she is. But she's still a teenager, and her best method of compensating for her inferiority is by making other people feel inferior. It comes off as cool disdain, regardless her actual sentiments underneath.
• Extremely controlling of her immediate surroundings. She doesn't care about other people's issues, but if it involves her, she has to be in control of it. Her grades, her network, her skills — even her disability. She just can't leave things in other people's hands, convinced they're going to botch it up. Look at her mother: Lorelai Robins has more scars from nearly botched jobs in her hands than she can count.
• That is another reason she doesn't date, outside the crippled thing: dating is a cooperative relationship (or ought to be), and Olivia doesn't have time to compromise with people she isn't entering into financial negotiations with. Similarly, it's why she doesn't keep many friends. The romantic aspect, of course, is gone, but the necessity for compromise is still there. By and large, Olivia adheres to the creed of everyone's favorite inkblotted antihero, and will adamantly refuse to compromise. Usually over stupid things.
• Has a lot of issues with her mother, understandably, and will avoid talking about her if possible. She very consciously and logically blames Lorelai for letting her daughter fall victim to a group of low-level French operatives — French! — and as such, avoids much of the teenage wangst when it comes to her mother; because, really, she is torn up about it in more than just an angry, hormonal way, and she doesn't know how to handle it. Her mother inadvertently led to Olivia's inability to ever walk properly again; that's not something you get over easily.
• In the same vein, she has a lot of issues with her late father, mostly stemming from knowing fuck-all about him. Olivia has vague memories, much of the blanks filled in with a combination of her mother's deprecating stories of him, and the nights Lorelai spent locked in her room drinking (those nights being: Jack's birthday, their wedding anniversary, Christmas, Valentine's, and Olivia's birthday; Olivia, being meticulously aware of any and all important dates, had these all catalogued by age 13). Olivia isn't so much mad at him as she is blank: she just doesn't know how to feel. She isn't angry at him or sad, or going to go breaking bottles of Nostalgia on Mars; but she does have a lot of repressed confusion and a need to be appreciated by overbearing female figures (ty drunken Lorelai) because of it. Not that many women can be overbearing with her, but still.

History:

• Olivia's parents met on a job. Lorelai Meadows, aka H21 (the codename of one Mata Hari, and leading to an easy instant deception she worked for the Germans), was on an independent contract for a smalltime Russian mob boss in New York. John "Jack" Robins was a translator for the UN, getting a sandwich. When things went awry and Lorelai grabbed the first male bystander she saw as a decoy, Jack was starstruck. Who was this beautiful woman, hissing to shut the hell up and act like a happy couple? When the threat left and Lorelai began looking for a place to hide, Jack instantly and stupidly offered up his loft. With little other recourse outside of jumping in the Hudson and swimming away, Lorelai accepted.
• While she was hardly impressed by Jack's relative ineptitude, she was charmed by his blunt honesty and complete inability to speak to her in non-stammering sentences. After all, the kind of guy she was used to was the suave, burly thief she met on a job, or the nasty mark she had to sleep with to get information. Jack was bumbling, intelligent, and largely a social fail: it was kind of nice.
• They slept together and she left town for a while, but surprised Jack by showing up a year or so later. She was "taking a break" from her "job," and — well, missed him. Her break got longer and longer, Lorelai found out she was pregnant, Jack proposed, and that was the end of that. H21 became Lorelai Robins, mother and housewife.
• Which worked for a while, at least. Lorelai wasn't cut out for domestication, let alone mothering. It started with simple "lessons" for Olivia, that consisted of being spoken to in Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian, and puzzles that eerily resembled some kind of wiring hookup. When Olivia started preschool, Lorelai went back into the field — sneakily at first, telling Jack she had a business conference, or a friend out of town to visit, and Jack, being generally simple, ate it up. For a little while, anyway. As Lorelai's absences became longer and she came home with more bruises and hole-filled stories, Jack had just about had it. He had a job, too, the nanny was practically raising their daughter, and he never even saw his wife anymore. The natural suspicions of affairs rose up, among other, more sinister fears that his wife had some kind of secret superhero identity (which was all right and glamorous for other people, but they had a daughter to think about, if she was going to be off engaging villainry every other night). He confronted her on it when Olivia was six years old, and despite Lorelai's claims that if she told him, she'd have to kill him, he insisted. So she explained: she was a highly trained independent operative, often working against the governments and international unity he so ardently supported. She spent more time out of the country than most people do in their homelands, had stolen several billion dollars' worth of goods in her career, and had no intention of ever letting her civilian identity — and, subsequently, her husband's and daughter's — be compromised.
• So, true to her word, she killed him. Lorelai knew better than to think even one person could be trusted with a secret that wasn't an active part of their everyday lives (and even then), and no matter Jack's professions of love and devotion, if one of her enemies had gotten him on a waterboard, or found some old bamboo shoots for his nails, he would have squealed like a pig, and that would have been the end of that. Bundling up Olivia, Lorelai left their apartment in Manhattan and never looked back.
• They spent the next nine years on a more or less constant series of contracts. Lorelai was always the frontrunner, and both for the sake of appearing competent and her daughter's safety, none of her business associates were aware she was the mother of the leggy blonde in her care. Some figured Lorelai had taken that 6 year break to bring up a protege — if they saw Olivia at all. While Olivia was still too young to fend for herself, Lorelai was extremely cautious to keep her out of sight of any rival spies, to train her quietly in the confines of their home/apartment/lean-to/etc., and to make sure she knew never to go outside if she wasn't with Lorelai. Olivia, largely a well-cared-for inmate, used the time indoors to, once she was capable of understanding the nature of her mother's work, start helping. Keeping files in order, following up on her mother's research while Lorelai was out of doors, honing her adult diplomatic voice in emails and anonymous contacts to keep communication open between her mother and her clients, and to learn a thing or two about computers.
• By age 12, her mother had more or less handed over the management duties to Olivia. This was a-okay by her, as Olivia had been less than a crackshot thief for the better part of three years. She was far from a genius, but both of them recognized that Olivia had a talent for the research and recon parts of the job. She could keep track of dozens of clients and their information at once, research new leads, and acquire a client or two. By 14, she had gained enough confidence operating under her mother's name to purchase, at a discount, combination magic/binary encryptions for all their files, making them effectively untraceable to anyone without a psionically trained hacker — and her mother proud. Olivia was learning the tricks of the trade, and the two of them had the makings of a real team.
• As per comic vigilantism, TRAGEDY STRUCK. While on a somewhat minor job in Istanbul, the Robinses had a break-in. Since the job was so small, Olivia, barely 15 and still unused to the pitfalls of her position, let her guard down. Lorelai, still unused to proper raising of her child, didn't well notice. A small group of rival French thieves, having tailed the Robinses and what they could find of Olivia's binary trail, came down on the hideout while Lorelai was recuperating after the actual theft, and Olivia was putting all their files to rights. It was swift and bloody: Lorelai was caught unawares, half asleep (half drunk), and while she struggled to keep herself afloat, Olivia struggled to protect their portable office. She was 15 and hadn't done any proper fighting in years: the French thieves easily overpowered her. Two shots to the legs and a smack with the butt of a gun to the back of Olivia's spine left her with a spinal fracture and incomplete lumbar paralysis.
• With extensive therapy (and a lot of painkillers), Olivia could walk, for the most part. Her left leg has difficulty bending, and she has little to no sensation in her left thigh; there are occasional urinary and bowel issues, and on bad days, the pain is as high as her lower thorax. And it wasn't only Olivia who suffered. Lorelai began a downward psychological spiral with her daughter's diagnosis. Blaming herself for the accident (as did Olivia, really), Lorelai quit her shady work entirely, relocated to her birthplace — Neopolis, USA — and set up using any and all ELE connections, particularly mad scientists, to try and rebuild her daughter's legs. For what she thought was Olivia's own good, Lorelai put her through a series of lengthy and painful attempts via a number of less than ethical cyberbiologists over the course of two years, while Olivia struggled to adjust to the Very Normal life she had been suddenly thrust into. It didn't work on either side. Olivia refused to cooperate, preferring relative deformity to the painful testing, which drove Lorelai into drunken depression when she couldn't mend her daughter. Olivia, a freak both socially and physically (though, she had to admit, not nearly as much as the kids at Insidious, wow), had to learn to survive the ~jungle~ of teenagerhood, for all intents and purposes, on her own.
• Which wasn't too bad, after a while. Olivia fell into her self-centered ways as her mother fell into alcoholism, alternating her time between looking out for number one and tending to Lorelai — and operating her fledgling spy network. Initiated in the hospital while in traction, Olivia slowly and surely began regathering all the information her mother had SO CARELESSLY lost track of while rushing Olivia to the best doctors possible. While the intermittent rounds of testing had put a damper on things, Olivia was able to get things somewhat up and running just before her 18th birthday. Two years after the mysterious demise of the former H21, the equally mysterious J appeared, contacting old clients, forging new ones. 'J' wasn't a field operative — in fact, no one knew what he (she?) even looked like; he simply seemed to have connections damn near anywhere, and could get most any out-of-work spy or thief something to do — for a share of the profits.
• Yeah, J was Olivia. Obviously. Her network was smaller than she made it seem, at first — a dozen or so clients and operatives each — but by the time she enrolled at Neopolis, it had grown to some 100 third parties altogether. Olivia was a mediocre student at Promethean in the meantime, largely to conceal her cleverness in the spy field and potential for ~something more~, but also because she couldn't really be bothered with triangulating how to propel an enemy when there was the recovery of a possible Atlantean artifact off the coast of Morocco to organize. She generally kept steady C's in everything but literature, which she usually failed (and which none of her professors understood, as she seemed to be constantly reading up on history and ancient literary texts), and disappointed her mother — who knew nothing of the network. As far as Olivia was concerned, her insipid drunken failure of a mother had no part in the international spy network she was building, and that was that.
• Naturally, with a growing professional profile and little interest in school, it didn't seem quite right for Olivia to enroll in Neopolis — and by all rights, she didn't want to, and but for three pointed reasons, she wouldn't have. Firstly, with seemingly no public future and no powers to speak of, Olivia was already garnering notice for her apparent ineptitude; doing at least semi-well at the new Academy would shift her back into the average crowd. She could even find some fake sciencey ability to stick to. Second, she knew there were going to be spy's kids enrolled there, and wanted to keep an eye on them. Competition, you know. And lastly, shamefully, some small kernel of her wanted to please her mother, who was positively giddy at the thought of her little Olivia rising to to the top of the Academy.
• So Olivia reluctantly enrolled in the science faculty, and that was that. She continues to maintain her spy network, though at a somewhat slower pace, considering her schoolwork, and continues to regret and lament her decision not to branch out on her own with just as much vigor as she did on walking in and meeting her roommate (who, regardless who it is, she will not like, because Olivia does not like sharing).

Played-By: Nora Arnezeder.

fun questions!

Aspirations: To be filthy rich and operate out of some uncharted island in the South Pacific, with a vast network of spies and undercover ops at her command, none of them acquainted with each other. To walk on her own legs, sans cane. To sleep with the Van Helsing twins, SHUT UP, IT IS A LEGITIMATE ASPIRATION.
What would be the title of the comic book starring your character? Olivia wouldn't have her own series, but would periodically appear as a nefarious but necessary ally to reluctant heroes, or a promising but demanding one to ne'er-do-wells. She would frequently feature in the titles of heroes and villains such as: Erik Harris (reluctant allies), Svetlana Duff and Darcy Thomas (not-so-friendly rivals), the Van Helsing twins (who she would hit on constantly), and the Justices (just for lulz, like they could afford her).

FINAL MOTHER PLOT

• Olivia is informed of her mother's death, and makes a call.
• Olivia makes her goodbye post. In it, she tells Vera and Zoe she's leaving to start up the Birds of Prey from outside Neopolis — get start up capital, facilities, contacts, a computer system. She'll be working with the mysterious Samson. She also addresses Marcus, Svetlana, Jack, and Ludwig — the last of which leaves a certain amount of Unfinished Business. Also, Marcus sings Leaving on a Jet Plane.
• OOC post!

banner credit to pigalle!