STEPHEN. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dostoevsky) wrote2015-01-31 08:33 pm
dostoevsky) wrote2015-01-31 08:33 pm
application // systemwide
UNPLUGGED
OOC
Name: MJ
Age: 28
Contact details:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
keelahselai
Characters already in Systemwide: None.
BASIC PROFILE
Name: Stephen Bloom
Age: 39
Canon: The Brothers Bloom
Appearance: One of many Mark Ruffalos.
Extraction point: Near the end of the film.
OVERVIEW
Personality: First, it's important to note that it was never about the money.
Or: it was only ever a little bit about the money. The brothers Bloom were gentleman thieves, emphasis on gentleman, and all those three-piece suits and hats didn't come cheap, especially when they were constantly being riddled with bullet holes and stained with fake blood. Same for all the vintage cars the brothers burned through (sometimes literally), train and steam ship and plane tickets, and the rotating casts of paid accomplices that populated the periphery of their elaborate cons. As world-renowned con artists at their peaks, Stephen and Bloom regularly dealt in millions of dollars, and Stephen recited those figures with relish. But at the end of the day, there was no hoard of gold. No permanent residence to speak of. Not even any particularly bulky luggage. Stephen bragged about the value of his Scotch and the storied history of the antique flask he kept it in, but when a camel stole the flask and guzzled the fancy liquor, he didn't care. He thought it was hilarious.
As a boy Stephen looked at the playground bourgeoisie and their Rocket Pops with as much disdain as envy. Once he and Bloom had suckered the other kids out of their pocket money and bought Rocket Pops of their own, Stephen had a few smug licks and threw it aside. The Rocket Pop wasn't the point. Pulling it off was the point. Stephen's competitive streak drove the brothers to the uppermost heights of the underworld, and when he'd outdone everyone else, he focused on outdoing himself: "How am I ever going to top this?" he asked Bloom at the end of their last job.
So the money was nice, but it was less the goal than a way to keep score. To know he'd won. What Stephen really loved was the job—the art—and his brother.
Not in that order.
Their whole lives—or Stephen's whole life, anyway—Stephen and Bloom only really had each other, cycling through foster homes and watching the local children play from the sidelines, then cycling through jobs with only one long(ish)-term accomplice. But Stephen, unlike Bloom, has a natural confidence and easy charm that would have made it easy for him to make friends, if he'd tried. He's a people person, outgoing and magnetic, comfortable in a crowd, not much of a spotlight hog but happy to bow if he finds himself caught in one. If anything he's a little too slick, with his quick grin and flashy card-handling. Very easy to like, not so easy to trust. Trust was Bloom's job. Stephen gives people the impression that he has something up his sleeve, and he almost always does.
But he might have been able to empty those sleeves and make some real connections, if he wanted to, and he didn't. Save for Bang Bang, the brothers never worked with the same people twice. The crowd of accomplices Stephen dances and plays cards with during the beginning of the film are people he had probably never met before hiring them on for the job and probably never spoke to again afterwards. Unlike Bloom, Stephen never wanted more than that.
The fact that he was the one making the plans and moving the pieces probably had something to do with it; his life wasn't much less a series of lies than Bloom's, but they were lies he came up with himself, stories he loved telling. He referred to what he did as writing, and he did it "like dead Russians write novels," Bloom explained, "with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit." True to trope, the brothers' best cons were largely harmless, nonviolent, and designed to enrich lives while emptying bank accounts. The perfect con, Stephen decided as a child, was one where everyone got what they wanted, whether that meant driving a spineless mark to grow so much of a back bone he was willing to kill "Victor" (Bloom) and vanish into the night, a changed man, without his fortune, or giving the shut-in Penelope the grand adventure Stephen figured she needed. It wasn't out of any compassion for the marks—Stephen isn't cruel, but he never got over his childhood contempt for people who had everything handed to them. He talked like he and Bloom were doing Penelope a favor, but he also called her a sucker and meant it. He liked her, but he didn't care about her very much.
Stephen knows he's clever, takes pride in his work, and enjoys a challenge. When Penelope went off script and pulled off the impossible, Stephen was fascinated, preoccupied with figuring out how she did it, but he rebuffed Bloom's offer to just ask her: "How obtuse." His cockiness is at least partly to blame for how things ended up—thinking nothing can possibly go wrong, the Russians can't hurt them, Penelope won't notice a man named Melville on a ship called the Fidele. He can't resist a literary allusion. Stephen is a literary allusion, too, to Joyce's Author, Stephen Dedalus, and a step beyond that to Daedalus, the craftsman, building impossible labyrinths and wax wings. He earned all that pride, with the brothers Bloom among the most respected con artists in the underworld, but in the end he tried to fly too high. Undone by hubris, like someone out of a Greek tragedy—he'd have liked that. Bloom tells Penelope that what Stephen wants is to tell a story so well it fulfills itself and becomes real. That's Stephen's thing, his Holy Grail, the way unplanned, organic love is Bloom's.
More than all of that, though, Stephen loved the shit out of his brother. Their first con was prompted not by the Rocket Pops—though it wouldn't have been the first time the boys did something for cash, having been tossed out of a previous foster home for selling all of the family's furniture—but by Bloom's inability to reach out to a girl he liked or leave Stephen behind to play with the other children. When it was he was playing the roper, with steps like "Bloom talks to girl" and "Bloom further endears himself" written out ahead of time, Bloom could make friends and work a crowd as well as anyone. Stephen thought he was helping. All of the jobs that came after it were about Bloom, too, with Stephen's inability to make Bloom happy inextricably tangled with his inability to pull off the perfect con he aspired to, where everyone—including Bloom, especially Bloom—got what they wanted.
Stephen was as dependent on Bloom as Bloom was on Stephen. He didn't have anyone else, except Bang Bang while she was willing to hang around, and furthermore didn't really want anyone else. But it was always harder to see, because Stephen was louder, flashier, and usually the one knocking heads together on Bloom's behalf. Protecting his brother is a reflex, often a violent one. In one of the film's first scenes, Foster Father #38 smacked young Bloom upside the head, and Stephen punched him square in the face. (So on to #39, who hit Stephen instead. It wasn't a happy childhood.) As a teenager Stephen discovered their mentor, Diamond Dog, had been molesting Bloom, and he took the old man's eye out with a antique rapier. Years afterward, when he found the Diamond Dog too close to Bloom in a hotel bar, Stephen broke the nearest bottle, gouged the hand that Dog had placed on Bloom's knee, wrestled the crippled old man to the floor, and had to be pried off by the alarmed hotel staff.
But for all that protectiveness, Stephen was probably one of the worst things in Bloom's life. It wasn't for lack of love or effort or good intentions, but what Bloom needed and what Stephen could give him were fundamentally incompatible. Stephen's presence was fundamentally incompatible. And inescapable. Whenever Bloom tried to step away from him, Stephen went after him and reeled him back in, filling all the empty spaces and silences in Bloom's life before Bloom had a chance to learn how to do it himself. When Bloom was at the end of his rope and fumbling to explain why he couldn't keep living the way they did, Stephen prompted, "You want an unwritten life." And Bloom echoed the line Stephen fed him, like always, and Stephen winked, like a dick, because he got it, but he didn't get it.
The film depicts their final con job, Stephen's final attempt, and the one that finally went right. It went right because it all went wrong: Bloom really fell in love, Penelope couldn't be confined by Stephen's plot, and the fake Russian mobsters became genuine threats. The story became real. When the bullets weren't scripted, when Stephen was beaten bloody and not in control anymore, Bloom was finally able to act. Stephen died on the job like he'd always sort of wanted—after taking a bullet for Bloom, like he'd always been willing to—and Bloom rode into the unwritten unknown with the newly-adventurous Penelope. Everyone got what they wanted.
Except the real thing Bloom finally got isn't real at all, it's turned out, and instead of dying on a stage, alone but fulfilled, the perfect denouement, Stephen was rescued from the abandoned theater and pulled out of his world into one where he doesn't have a brother, can't so easily game people for fun or profit, and doesn't own a single goddamn hat.
Matrix: A world with one foot in the 2000s and the other in the jazz age, where cell phones and telegrams are both acceptable forms of everyday communication, anime and karaoke machines exist but everyone seems to have made a pact to never use a computer in public view, and someone wearing a three-piece suit and fedora while smoking a cigarillo on a passenger train does not stand out at all. There are normal people out there—selling apples, taking photographs of explosions, etc.—but everything is a touch more dramatic, more fashionable, and more like a fiction. The heroes are debonair and the villains are Dickensian; the brothers are foster children, not workhouse orphans, but two out of two depicted foster fathers hit them, and in case anyone might have missed the comparison, Stephen refers to Diamond Dog as "our old Fagin." There's no outright magic to speak of, but the unbelievable is a little more believable.
Real World: Stephen was unplugged approximately one year ago, and for all outward appearances, he's handled it well. He's always been adaptable. He threw himself into rehabilitation wholeheartedly because it gave him something to do other than worry about Bloom, who was out there living a lie exactly like he never wanted and, also, apparently, not technically Stephen's brother to begin with. Lately he's a bit at loose ends, but he's been working as a farmhand to try to be useful, hanging around the storytellers and orators for entertainment, and making connections without quite making friends. He has yet to reenter the Matrix proper. Having dealt in fiction his whole life, he's not very impressed by the grim, miserable world he's found himself in just because it happens to be more real. If Bloom weren't around/about to be around/etc., he might be at risk of trying to get plugged back in.
ABILITIES AND SKILLS
Anomalies: None.
Skillset: Stephen and Bloom were among the most talented high-rolling con artists in their world, with all that entails, and they reached those heights after coming from nothing and climbing the less glamorous lower rungs of the criminal underworld, with all that entails. Stephen is brilliant, inventive, and empathetic—in the sense that he can figure out how people tick, even if he doesn't always particularly care how they feel—to an extent that jives with his world's stylistic magical realism but would be preternatural anywhere else. He's street smart, well-traveled, and, despite dropping out of school in his early teens, very well-read. Bloom is the real actor, the roper to Stephen's fixer; the characters Stephen plays in their cons are basically just himself, maybe with a fake accent or something but still the money-focused and slightly shady counterpart to whatever role Bloom has taken on. Nonetheless, Stephen can sell a lie or a choreographed fight scene as required, and he's a decent artist, a scrappy fighter, an excellent card handler, and capable of acrobatically rolling backwards and up onto his feet with a cheerful grin after being shot in the back.
Upload Capabilities:
OOC
Name: MJ
Age: 28
Contact details:
Characters already in Systemwide: None.
BASIC PROFILE
Name: Stephen Bloom
Age: 39
Canon: The Brothers Bloom
Appearance: One of many Mark Ruffalos.
Extraction point: Near the end of the film.
OVERVIEW
Personality: First, it's important to note that it was never about the money.
Or: it was only ever a little bit about the money. The brothers Bloom were gentleman thieves, emphasis on gentleman, and all those three-piece suits and hats didn't come cheap, especially when they were constantly being riddled with bullet holes and stained with fake blood. Same for all the vintage cars the brothers burned through (sometimes literally), train and steam ship and plane tickets, and the rotating casts of paid accomplices that populated the periphery of their elaborate cons. As world-renowned con artists at their peaks, Stephen and Bloom regularly dealt in millions of dollars, and Stephen recited those figures with relish. But at the end of the day, there was no hoard of gold. No permanent residence to speak of. Not even any particularly bulky luggage. Stephen bragged about the value of his Scotch and the storied history of the antique flask he kept it in, but when a camel stole the flask and guzzled the fancy liquor, he didn't care. He thought it was hilarious.
As a boy Stephen looked at the playground bourgeoisie and their Rocket Pops with as much disdain as envy. Once he and Bloom had suckered the other kids out of their pocket money and bought Rocket Pops of their own, Stephen had a few smug licks and threw it aside. The Rocket Pop wasn't the point. Pulling it off was the point. Stephen's competitive streak drove the brothers to the uppermost heights of the underworld, and when he'd outdone everyone else, he focused on outdoing himself: "How am I ever going to top this?" he asked Bloom at the end of their last job.
So the money was nice, but it was less the goal than a way to keep score. To know he'd won. What Stephen really loved was the job—the art—and his brother.
Not in that order.
Their whole lives—or Stephen's whole life, anyway—Stephen and Bloom only really had each other, cycling through foster homes and watching the local children play from the sidelines, then cycling through jobs with only one long(ish)-term accomplice. But Stephen, unlike Bloom, has a natural confidence and easy charm that would have made it easy for him to make friends, if he'd tried. He's a people person, outgoing and magnetic, comfortable in a crowd, not much of a spotlight hog but happy to bow if he finds himself caught in one. If anything he's a little too slick, with his quick grin and flashy card-handling. Very easy to like, not so easy to trust. Trust was Bloom's job. Stephen gives people the impression that he has something up his sleeve, and he almost always does.
But he might have been able to empty those sleeves and make some real connections, if he wanted to, and he didn't. Save for Bang Bang, the brothers never worked with the same people twice. The crowd of accomplices Stephen dances and plays cards with during the beginning of the film are people he had probably never met before hiring them on for the job and probably never spoke to again afterwards. Unlike Bloom, Stephen never wanted more than that.
The fact that he was the one making the plans and moving the pieces probably had something to do with it; his life wasn't much less a series of lies than Bloom's, but they were lies he came up with himself, stories he loved telling. He referred to what he did as writing, and he did it "like dead Russians write novels," Bloom explained, "with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit." True to trope, the brothers' best cons were largely harmless, nonviolent, and designed to enrich lives while emptying bank accounts. The perfect con, Stephen decided as a child, was one where everyone got what they wanted, whether that meant driving a spineless mark to grow so much of a back bone he was willing to kill "Victor" (Bloom) and vanish into the night, a changed man, without his fortune, or giving the shut-in Penelope the grand adventure Stephen figured she needed. It wasn't out of any compassion for the marks—Stephen isn't cruel, but he never got over his childhood contempt for people who had everything handed to them. He talked like he and Bloom were doing Penelope a favor, but he also called her a sucker and meant it. He liked her, but he didn't care about her very much.
Stephen knows he's clever, takes pride in his work, and enjoys a challenge. When Penelope went off script and pulled off the impossible, Stephen was fascinated, preoccupied with figuring out how she did it, but he rebuffed Bloom's offer to just ask her: "How obtuse." His cockiness is at least partly to blame for how things ended up—thinking nothing can possibly go wrong, the Russians can't hurt them, Penelope won't notice a man named Melville on a ship called the Fidele. He can't resist a literary allusion. Stephen is a literary allusion, too, to Joyce's Author, Stephen Dedalus, and a step beyond that to Daedalus, the craftsman, building impossible labyrinths and wax wings. He earned all that pride, with the brothers Bloom among the most respected con artists in the underworld, but in the end he tried to fly too high. Undone by hubris, like someone out of a Greek tragedy—he'd have liked that. Bloom tells Penelope that what Stephen wants is to tell a story so well it fulfills itself and becomes real. That's Stephen's thing, his Holy Grail, the way unplanned, organic love is Bloom's.
More than all of that, though, Stephen loved the shit out of his brother. Their first con was prompted not by the Rocket Pops—though it wouldn't have been the first time the boys did something for cash, having been tossed out of a previous foster home for selling all of the family's furniture—but by Bloom's inability to reach out to a girl he liked or leave Stephen behind to play with the other children. When it was he was playing the roper, with steps like "Bloom talks to girl" and "Bloom further endears himself" written out ahead of time, Bloom could make friends and work a crowd as well as anyone. Stephen thought he was helping. All of the jobs that came after it were about Bloom, too, with Stephen's inability to make Bloom happy inextricably tangled with his inability to pull off the perfect con he aspired to, where everyone—including Bloom, especially Bloom—got what they wanted.
Stephen was as dependent on Bloom as Bloom was on Stephen. He didn't have anyone else, except Bang Bang while she was willing to hang around, and furthermore didn't really want anyone else. But it was always harder to see, because Stephen was louder, flashier, and usually the one knocking heads together on Bloom's behalf. Protecting his brother is a reflex, often a violent one. In one of the film's first scenes, Foster Father #38 smacked young Bloom upside the head, and Stephen punched him square in the face. (So on to #39, who hit Stephen instead. It wasn't a happy childhood.) As a teenager Stephen discovered their mentor, Diamond Dog, had been molesting Bloom, and he took the old man's eye out with a antique rapier. Years afterward, when he found the Diamond Dog too close to Bloom in a hotel bar, Stephen broke the nearest bottle, gouged the hand that Dog had placed on Bloom's knee, wrestled the crippled old man to the floor, and had to be pried off by the alarmed hotel staff.
But for all that protectiveness, Stephen was probably one of the worst things in Bloom's life. It wasn't for lack of love or effort or good intentions, but what Bloom needed and what Stephen could give him were fundamentally incompatible. Stephen's presence was fundamentally incompatible. And inescapable. Whenever Bloom tried to step away from him, Stephen went after him and reeled him back in, filling all the empty spaces and silences in Bloom's life before Bloom had a chance to learn how to do it himself. When Bloom was at the end of his rope and fumbling to explain why he couldn't keep living the way they did, Stephen prompted, "You want an unwritten life." And Bloom echoed the line Stephen fed him, like always, and Stephen winked, like a dick, because he got it, but he didn't get it.
The film depicts their final con job, Stephen's final attempt, and the one that finally went right. It went right because it all went wrong: Bloom really fell in love, Penelope couldn't be confined by Stephen's plot, and the fake Russian mobsters became genuine threats. The story became real. When the bullets weren't scripted, when Stephen was beaten bloody and not in control anymore, Bloom was finally able to act. Stephen died on the job like he'd always sort of wanted—after taking a bullet for Bloom, like he'd always been willing to—and Bloom rode into the unwritten unknown with the newly-adventurous Penelope. Everyone got what they wanted.
Except the real thing Bloom finally got isn't real at all, it's turned out, and instead of dying on a stage, alone but fulfilled, the perfect denouement, Stephen was rescued from the abandoned theater and pulled out of his world into one where he doesn't have a brother, can't so easily game people for fun or profit, and doesn't own a single goddamn hat.
Matrix: A world with one foot in the 2000s and the other in the jazz age, where cell phones and telegrams are both acceptable forms of everyday communication, anime and karaoke machines exist but everyone seems to have made a pact to never use a computer in public view, and someone wearing a three-piece suit and fedora while smoking a cigarillo on a passenger train does not stand out at all. There are normal people out there—selling apples, taking photographs of explosions, etc.—but everything is a touch more dramatic, more fashionable, and more like a fiction. The heroes are debonair and the villains are Dickensian; the brothers are foster children, not workhouse orphans, but two out of two depicted foster fathers hit them, and in case anyone might have missed the comparison, Stephen refers to Diamond Dog as "our old Fagin." There's no outright magic to speak of, but the unbelievable is a little more believable.
Real World: Stephen was unplugged approximately one year ago, and for all outward appearances, he's handled it well. He's always been adaptable. He threw himself into rehabilitation wholeheartedly because it gave him something to do other than worry about Bloom, who was out there living a lie exactly like he never wanted and, also, apparently, not technically Stephen's brother to begin with. Lately he's a bit at loose ends, but he's been working as a farmhand to try to be useful, hanging around the storytellers and orators for entertainment, and making connections without quite making friends. He has yet to reenter the Matrix proper. Having dealt in fiction his whole life, he's not very impressed by the grim, miserable world he's found himself in just because it happens to be more real. If Bloom weren't around/about to be around/etc., he might be at risk of trying to get plugged back in.
ABILITIES AND SKILLS
Anomalies: None.
Skillset: Stephen and Bloom were among the most talented high-rolling con artists in their world, with all that entails, and they reached those heights after coming from nothing and climbing the less glamorous lower rungs of the criminal underworld, with all that entails. Stephen is brilliant, inventive, and empathetic—in the sense that he can figure out how people tick, even if he doesn't always particularly care how they feel—to an extent that jives with his world's stylistic magical realism but would be preternatural anywhere else. He's street smart, well-traveled, and, despite dropping out of school in his early teens, very well-read. Bloom is the real actor, the roper to Stephen's fixer; the characters Stephen plays in their cons are basically just himself, maybe with a fake accent or something but still the money-focused and slightly shady counterpart to whatever role Bloom has taken on. Nonetheless, Stephen can sell a lie or a choreographed fight scene as required, and he's a decent artist, a scrappy fighter, an excellent card handler, and capable of acrobatically rolling backwards and up onto his feet with a cheerful grin after being shot in the back.
Upload Capabilities:
Anomalous Skills: 1
Martial Arts: 2
Projectile Weaponry: 2
Technical Skills: 1
Wild Card: 4
Martial Arts: 2
Projectile Weaponry: 2
Technical Skills: 1
Wild Card: 4