Application to TLV

[maced_eggs]

User Name/Nick: Allison
User DW: cannibal_herpes
AIM/IM: cannibalherpes, same as plurk
E-mail: allisonhodges2@gmail.com
Other Characters: Chris, Ned, Scorpius

Character Name: Mason
Series: Dead Like Me
Age: Technically 70ish, died when he was 27.
From When?: After Mason murders Ray

Inmate/Warden: Inmate.

Why?

Because Mason is a Class A Fuck-Up.

He steals, lies, and cheats to get his own way. A big fan of petty thievery and occasionally outright burglary, he constantly lives off the good will and grace of other people's hard work, and wouldn't know how to earn a day's wages if he tried. His one goal in life is to find a place where he doesn't have to do any work whatsoever and can spend his days chasing that ultimate high. Mason lacks any sort of ambition or personal goal-setting and would be very much content to live forever off of other people.

He's heavily into drugs, particularly pharmaceuticals but draws the line at needles because he's scared of them. Whenever he tries to do right he ultimately fucks it up, but is much more the type to ruin his own life than the lives of other people...at least, not on purpose. He's indulgent and has absolutely no self-restraint, will try nearly anything at least once, is involved with light crime but nothing violent: all of his screw-ups are due primarily to his own failings.

Finally, he's just a jerk who tends to be oblivious to the needs and feelings of other people around him. On rare occasions he has the capability to be extremely sympathetic, but more often than not puts himself before other people: selfishness and an inclination to self-harm by way of poisoning his body and mind is the name of the game.

Abilities/Powers: Mason is a grim reaper. He is undead, which comes with a certain level of immortality/invulnerability: he can't die again, and he can get plenty hurt, but things that would ordinarily kill a regular person just tend to heal over in time.

Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt like a bitch.

This also means that most of the drugs he takes have a severely reduced side effect on him, and thus he must constantly ingest larger quantities in order to get that same high.

In terms of reaper powers, Mason is the same as the rest of his cohorts in that he is tasked with removing the souls of dead people from their bodies via physical touch. He can pull a soul out of its body by touching it but is instructed only to do this to people who are dead or about to die: doing it to others could lead to disastrous consequences. He can also speak to ghosts that no one else can see or hear.

Personality:

Mason is primarily an addict and has zero self-restraint when it comes to substance abuse, mostly pills but occasionally harder treats. He seems to have a complete lack of any idea of self-preservation or common sense, and one need not look farther than the way he died: using a power drill to put a hole into his own brain because someone had told him it would decrease his tolerance.

Mason constantly looks to cut corners in life. If something is safer or nicer, but is more expensive or takes longer, he'll opt out and choose the easy, destructive path every time. He's a constant leech off others, never fully understanding or appreciating that he survives on the reluctant goodwill of those around him. When he reaches something that's too difficult, he'll almost always choose to give up: rarely, however, he'll find things to self-motivate him and propel him through.

While his demeanor is usually cheery and carefree with a bit of stoner wisdom tucked in, when Mason crashes, he crashes hard. Facing hard times, Mason will become inconsolable, depressed, and obstinate. His most common method for dealing with something too big or hard is biting sarcasm or bitterness, and instead of facing his problems he'll usually do his best to avoid being caught or hide out for the rest of eternity. He rarely thinks things through and prefers to live in the moment, acting on impulse and instinct rather than through common sense or guidance.

If anything, over time his personality has gotten worse and less treatable. Terrified of things he can't understand, Mason has turned to treating his job as one more thing he's stuck doing instead of an important service. He cracks jokes and steals from the dead, all to avoid thinking of the bigger, scarier questions that tend to plague those caught in the in-between. He is rude and abrasive and always tends to take his jokes a step or two too far into genuinely offensive territory, and then doesn't seem to understand why people don't take more of a liking to him. In many ways, despite his age and experience Mason is naive and dumb, having never truly lived genuinely or given any part of himself selflessly to other people.

Mason is very much like an easily manipulated child, and usually will go along with what anyone tells him. He is gullible and easily bullied by people in authority, because he's intimidated by them. He's hopeless at taking care of himself, and instead of following his fellow reapers in holding down a second job, he constantly gets by through scavenging, petty crime, robbing the dead, and couch-crashing when he finally becomes homeless. Partially lovable and partially exasperating, Mason seems to walk a fine line on the patience of other people and often will push his boundaries or expect too much generosity.

Despite rampant selfishness, Mason at times can be surprisingly introspective and heartfelt. He feels deeply about a few key things, and when he gets arsed enough to care about something, he becomes fiercely loyal and devoted. When faced with something he wants to do and can do, he becomes narrow-minded and focused on the task, exhausting himself to complete it and then almost immediately crashing afterwards for weeks. Mason's efforts come in fits and bursts: he'll spend tons of time wallowing and boredly passing one day to the next, and then all of a sudden will become terrier-like focused for all of two days, and then his attention will drop off again.

Where women are concerned, Mason is both hopelessly out of his depth but also rather defensive and protective of girls in particular. While he doesn't seem to have much sex - most women don't find his self-indulgence and loafing about particularly attractive - Mason at the same time is extremely empathetic towards most girls and often loses his temper when he sees men beating up on women: on two separate occasions, Mason broke his usual nonviolent personality by beating up one abuser and killing another for hurting their girlfriends.

Mason has a bit of a paranoid streak about him, and easily falls for ridiculous conspiracy theories and takes whatever he reads in daily tabloids as honest fact. He's a huckster, a gambler, and a con artist, but a remarkably bad one with too much heart and very little ability to palm cards. On the rare occasions when he's serious, Mason is alarmingly calm, tearful, and insightful, but more often than not he tends to bounce back to his usual brash self. He does have the capacity and occasional inclination to get sober and clean himself up, but these desires are usually fleeting and coming at the tail end of a bad experience.

Altogether, Mason is mostly passive, wanting to only waltz through life without ever having to work at it or give support to other people. When faced point blank with the way he hurts people, Mason is generally remorseful but can't seem to push this remorse to its logical point of actually fixing his mistakes, and instead only mopes. Left to his own devices, Mason is content to wallow forever in the shallows, never taking the plunge to deeper and more meaningful experiences.

Barge Reactions:

Like the vacation he's been waiting for.

Upon first arrival, Mason will be confused and will have assumed he got really drunk and was shanghaied onto some cruise line and isn't Rube going to be pissed when he finds out he's gone missing. He'll spend a tiny bit of effort trying to see what it would take to get home but eventually just straight give up and go with the flow.

As the days pass, he'll eventually realize that whatever he did is his fault, and spend a brief time bemoaning that he didn't realize he could fuck up this badly. Eventually this will fade and a normal - albeit different sort of normal - pace will take over: Mason will realize that on the Barge, he won't have to reap any souls and can thus spend his time enjoying himself to the fullest. Given that reaping is a secretive, lonely life lived on the fringes, Mason will revel in his ability to simply be the whole of himself, free to tell non-reapers who and what he is.

Having already died and lived to tell about it, Mason knows better than anyone that there's a lot of things in the multiverse he doesn't understand and doesn't have a hope of understanding, and will tend to ask invasive, irritating questions to anyone who doesn't look strictly human. He's no stranger to being forced into doing something you don't want to do or be somewhere you don't want to be, and will consider being an inmate a significant step up from reaping: at least here, he's not homeless and he's not being made to take up an occupation.

He will also probably try to get laid. A lot.

Path to Redemption:
Mason is, at heart, a good person. So the hard part's done already.

He's seen a lot of terrible things, and his method of coping is primarily drugs and sarcasm. He reacts badly to authority figures and people trying to impose their will over him and will fight back by being as obstinate and obnoxious as humanly possible. He is very much an oblivious moron who doesn't understand what he's doing to his life and has no particular urge to fix it. Anything to make his life easier and make a quick buck he will do, and has little care for people he might exploit...unless he has to watch their faces and understand how he's hurt them.

Pretty girls are a weakness: Mason is a sucker for pity sex. He is extremely lonely and deeply wants to find an intimate and personal connection with someone without having to clean himself up or make himself into the sort of person people would want to be around: most of the people he's with have to be around him. The dead don't phase him, but if he crosses a line he's drawn himself (i.e., violent crime, murder), it will shake him to his core and scare him straight.

Showing Mason how his behavior affects other people is tantamount to his graduation: Mason lives in a selfish bubble of self-indulgence, and showing him that other people's feelings matter and that what he does affects them will play to his sympathetic side and win him over. But as he tends to forget lessons almost as soon as he learns them, this may be something of an uphill battle.

History: In 1939, Mason was born in England.

In 1966, Mason died of a self-inflicted hole in his head by way of a handheld drill.

That was when things really took off.

Mason upon point of death became a grim reaper: an undead in-between acting as a sort of spirit guide ushering the newly dead into the Great Beyond. In this capacity Mason was generally capable, if occasionally a little unreliable and uncaring. He performed this service for nearly forty years, traveling from place to place reaping the souls of people who had died from "external influences": murders, accidents, and suicides.

During his time as a reaper, Mason found reaping generally an upsetting practice and sought to distance himself from the souls of people he'd killed, mainly by taking lots of drugs, making a point not to get to know anyone around him, and treating the whole thing as a funny joke.

Eventually Mason found himself working in Seattle under the authority of Head Reaper Rube, alongside other reapers by the names of Roxie, Betty, and eventually Daisy and George. Mason met George after the 18-year-old died due to a falling toilet seat crashing from a space station, and helped to guide her through her first few reaps, showing her the ropes and tricks of life as a grim reaper. When fellow reaper Betty crossed over to the other side, transfer reaper Daisy Adair arrived to take Betty's place. Mason was immediately smitten, and despite Daisy's clear lack of interest continued to hold a crush on her for the rest of their time together.

After being deeply, emotionally affected by the deaths of two gay men he had to reap, Mason had a sympathetic change of heart and passed the keys to his house to Daisy and George, telling Daisy to take the house because she and George needed the extra room more than he did. He trades, and goes to live in George's terrible apartment instead.

Over the course of the series, Mason reaps souls, steals money, uses drugs, and muddles through the bureaucracy of the afterlife that includes self-evaluations and lots of paperwork, never maturing or keeping a learned lesson in his head for more than a few days put together.

As time goes by, Mason and Daisy come closer together by degrees, as they begin to bond over their selfishness, loneliness, and desire to connect to someone and feel as though there's more out of the afterlife than what they're getting. When Mason admits he fucked up a reap and fears facing the music with Rube, Daisy gives him a kiss and encouragement. When Mason steals a diamond necklace off a dog in a country club and gives it to Daisy for a present, she shares with him a deeply personal story about her sister.

At the tail end of their respective reaps one day, Mason and Daisy meet with George in a bar, with Daisy surprising Mason by bringing along a man called Ray. Immediately taking a jealous disliking to the man, Mason attempted to chase Ray off but was ultimately unsuccessful, and the two ended up playing pool together. Ray offered to back off if Mason expressed romantic interest in Daisy, but Mason declined, saying they were "just friends." Later in the night, Ray expressed a tendency towards violence when he struck a bully in the face with a pool cue, breaking the man's nose.

As the relationship between Ray and Daisy continues, Mason begins to recognize signs that Daisy is with an emotional and physical abuser. At first too cowardly and uncertain to act against Ray, he sits on the fringes, watching the tension escalate and unfairly blaming Daisy for going along with it. When Daisy asks Mason and Ray to come along for her reap at a boxing match, the tension between Mason and Ray escalates as Ray attempts to bully Mason into backing away from Daisy and Mason fights him. Despite Mason's rapid healing, he brutally loses the fight when his drunkeness and Ray's skill and taunting win out.

Put off by Ray's refusal to be gentle with Mason, Daisy declares to her fellow reapers that she's decided to break up with him. The two drink together and come back to Mason's old house, singing, only to find that Ray broke into the house waiting for Daisy to return. Daisy asks him to leave, telling him that she's breaking up with him. Ray, in response, grabs Daisy by the throat and tells her that he's the only one who ends things. Mason smashes a heavy mirror repeatedly over Ray's head, bludgeoning him to death.

Sample Journal Entry: Oh, what the fuck is this, then? You've got to be kidding. I mean, you can't really be serious. Seriously? Issnot like I haven't got enough problems, have I? Sitting on a bloody boat in the middle of fuck-all, what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?

I haven't done anythin' to deserve this. I haven't. It's not even a proper cruise, is it? No beautiful women in bathing suits lyin' about, no, it has to be full of fuckin' criminals, people of th' sort of nature of which I have had no part in whatsoever. Seriously. Seriously, Rube, get me the fuck out of here. I want to go home. I want to go home to my lovely own bed an' not sleep in a fucking cabin with strangers that'll cut me open soon as I close my eyes.

I'm not a villain! I don't even. Why would you lot say I was? You don't know me! Fuck off, the lot of you!

Fuckin' hell..

Sample RP: Blah blah, inmate. Blah blah, prison. Mason had never been to prison before: despite his numerous and varied cons and thievery, he'd always managed to somehow stay ahead of the game. Sure, he'd been detained a number of times at checkpoints and in airports while running drugs, but he'd never been caught.

Seems his luck had run out.

Or...maybe not. Because the Barge was a spot nicer than any prison he'd ever imagine being in, and no one had attempted any unwanted advances and all in all it seemed sort of...nice. He had his own room and no one was shouting at him to pay rent, and - this was the best part - no one had handed him any bloody Post-It notes, giving him a shove out the door. Mason had, figuratively, everything he could possibly need. No responsibilities, no job, no more reaps, no getting kicked out of his home, free food...

Right. Food. Nudging his way into the breakfast bar, Mason freely cut in line and began to snatch two or three little cereal boxes. And then another two or three more.

Soon his arms were bulging with the things. Food was free, wasn't it? What's to stop him from taking it all? If anyone gave him a dirty look about it, he told them the same thing:

"Oy. Piss off. Go find your own."

Arms laden with food, Mason turned heel and left to go stockpile the food under his new bed.

Special Notes: Mason's powers should be nearly all stripped from him upon arrival to the Barge: no yanking souls out of bodies, no healing or immunity to death, no built-up tolerance to drugs and alcohol. He may still have the ability to communicate with dead souls no one else can see, but I don't see this coming into play much at all.