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IC Contact Post
Aug. 19th, 2030 04:12 pm
"Heyyyy, you've reached the head office of the Atlas Corporation, leave a message and your number, and one of our people will get back to you."
Demotion Deets & PTR
Oct. 21st, 2019 03:14 amBut Rhys is adorable? How did such a charming young cyborg get demoted?
You know what? Rhys is adorable! But he also possessed Betelgeuse and made him jump off the deck.
Wow what? That's kind of extreme!
I know, I know don't @ me! But this hasn't come from nowhere. Rhys has never been an altruistic warden. His moral compass has always been defined by a combination of ego and personal interests, and a lot of what's kept him on the straight and narrow as a warden has been the fact that a lot of his self esteem is tied up in being good at his job, which eventually was paired with a major emotional attachment to his inmate.
In fact, when Bill briefly broke the Barge, and Rhys decided to go with him - pretty much the only thing that made him a moderating presence and not just a stupid wingman on a weird and wild ride with his new horrible friend - was his conscious commitment to what was best for Hux.
Now however, with Hux graduated, and Rhys just kinda hanging on because he likes the Barge, he's left with the fact that it maybe kinda hasn't been entirely great for him. One thing that he's done massively while he's been on board, is to indulge in friendships, rivalries, and relationships with people who satisfy an urge that he has for... well, power and pissing contests. Even his aspirations to be better and do better than people, are rooted - very literally - in wanting to be better than other people rather than having a strong moral core of his own. A lot of these destructive dynamics come from the toxicity of working for Hyperion - where there was a lot of currency in hostile banter, backstabbing, and cut-throat ladder climbing. I said in his original app that Rhys was an octopus who learned to swim with sharks, but that means there's a lot of stuff that he also never unlearned, because of...
Our old friend, trauma!
This is why Rhys is getting demoted right now and not a few months back when Hux first graduated. Because Betelgeuse - right from their first encounter - was hitting some fuckin' buttons for Rhys.
The thing is, there is already a nickname issuing, wise cracking, vividly threatening dead guy in his pretty recent past. With whom Rhys made some extremely bad decisions and had kind of an intense relationship, involving possession, intangibility, and ended with Rhys condemning him to infinite nothingness.
The thing is, Rhys's kneejerk reaction to meeting Betelgeuse was to low key recognise this dynamic, and to be lured back into a bunch of his own behaviours that had come with it in the past. Partly out of guilt, or insecurity about having gotten rid of his actual idol in such a hauntingly unpleasant way, and partly just because - as mentioned above, he's never actually unlearned the shit that led to this in the first place.
While some of what got Rhys into this situation was the fact that he was emotionally compromised by the moon event, the actual moment where he forced Betelgeuse to jump overboard after him was pure Rhys. He was punishing someone for traumatically hurting him - he was lashing out at the memory of someone who wasn't there - and he also just needed to win.
Path to Redemption
It's actually not super complicated beyond what I've written above!
Rhys needs to do more to unlearn the corporate culture of Hyperion, instead of constantly having it in the back of his mind as a fallback for when he meets someone who it'll be fun to have a weird and damaging rivalry with.
One of Rhys's strengths on the Barge is that he's pretty accepting of other people, no matter how bad they are. This isn't something he should lose, but he needs to be able to tell the difference between being accepting of someone and mutually enabling his absolute worst instincts with them.
This is probably going to be complicated by the fact that he's going to be unbelievably embarrassed and angry at what he sees as an unfair demotion because I'm a cruel player! \o/
You know what? Rhys is adorable! But he also possessed Betelgeuse and made him jump off the deck.
Wow what? That's kind of extreme!
I know, I know don't @ me! But this hasn't come from nowhere. Rhys has never been an altruistic warden. His moral compass has always been defined by a combination of ego and personal interests, and a lot of what's kept him on the straight and narrow as a warden has been the fact that a lot of his self esteem is tied up in being good at his job, which eventually was paired with a major emotional attachment to his inmate.
In fact, when Bill briefly broke the Barge, and Rhys decided to go with him - pretty much the only thing that made him a moderating presence and not just a stupid wingman on a weird and wild ride with his new horrible friend - was his conscious commitment to what was best for Hux.
Now however, with Hux graduated, and Rhys just kinda hanging on because he likes the Barge, he's left with the fact that it maybe kinda hasn't been entirely great for him. One thing that he's done massively while he's been on board, is to indulge in friendships, rivalries, and relationships with people who satisfy an urge that he has for... well, power and pissing contests. Even his aspirations to be better and do better than people, are rooted - very literally - in wanting to be better than other people rather than having a strong moral core of his own. A lot of these destructive dynamics come from the toxicity of working for Hyperion - where there was a lot of currency in hostile banter, backstabbing, and cut-throat ladder climbing. I said in his original app that Rhys was an octopus who learned to swim with sharks, but that means there's a lot of stuff that he also never unlearned, because of...
Our old friend, trauma!
This is why Rhys is getting demoted right now and not a few months back when Hux first graduated. Because Betelgeuse - right from their first encounter - was hitting some fuckin' buttons for Rhys.
The thing is, there is already a nickname issuing, wise cracking, vividly threatening dead guy in his pretty recent past. With whom Rhys made some extremely bad decisions and had kind of an intense relationship, involving possession, intangibility, and ended with Rhys condemning him to infinite nothingness.
The thing is, Rhys's kneejerk reaction to meeting Betelgeuse was to low key recognise this dynamic, and to be lured back into a bunch of his own behaviours that had come with it in the past. Partly out of guilt, or insecurity about having gotten rid of his actual idol in such a hauntingly unpleasant way, and partly just because - as mentioned above, he's never actually unlearned the shit that led to this in the first place.
While some of what got Rhys into this situation was the fact that he was emotionally compromised by the moon event, the actual moment where he forced Betelgeuse to jump overboard after him was pure Rhys. He was punishing someone for traumatically hurting him - he was lashing out at the memory of someone who wasn't there - and he also just needed to win.
Path to Redemption
It's actually not super complicated beyond what I've written above!
Rhys needs to do more to unlearn the corporate culture of Hyperion, instead of constantly having it in the back of his mind as a fallback for when he meets someone who it'll be fun to have a weird and damaging rivalry with.
One of Rhys's strengths on the Barge is that he's pretty accepting of other people, no matter how bad they are. This isn't something he should lose, but he needs to be able to tell the difference between being accepting of someone and mutually enabling his absolute worst instincts with them.
This is probably going to be complicated by the fact that he's going to be unbelievably embarrassed and angry at what he sees as an unfair demotion because I'm a cruel player! \o/
User Name/Nick:
User DW:
E-mail:
Other Characters: none!
Character Name: Rhys
Series: Tales from the Borderlands
Age: We never get a confirmed age for Rhys, but his college besty is 27, so we'll go with around there.
From When?: After the game concludes.
Inmate/Warden: Warden - Over the course of Tales from the Boarderlands, Rhys goes through his own redemption arc of sorts. While he starts the game more oblivious than evil, he still goes from being an employee of a destructive arms company, who idolizes a ruthless psychopath, to a man trying to build something better, able to turn his back on power and willing to sacrifice to protect his friends. He doesn't come from a world of moral absolutes, and he still managed to evolve, grow, and stand up for something, even though it's hard. I think this would arm him to contend with inmates who might be going back to worlds where it's harder to be good than it is on the barge.
Item: A happy little bot named Dumpy...
Abilities/Powers: Rhys has three cyborg augmentations: A robotic arm, an ECHO-eye, and a port in his temple which he can connect to computers, mobile devices, and store data in.
All of his augmentations seem to work together, which suggests that they're all linked to his central nervous system. Data which goes in though his port can be accessed both through his echo eye, and via a mobile interface connected to his arm. He can synch both his eye and arm with wireless devices (usually robots) and control them remotely. With a little help from a rogue AI, he's able to hack into the compute systems of an entire base this way, and seize control of weapons and transport without tipping anyone off, but at the canon point I'm bringing him aboard from, he doesn't have any AI assistance, so would only be able to accomplish minor wireless hacking, or would need to link up to something in order to get control of it.
His robotic arm is much stronger and more durable than his normal arm, and his ECHO-eye can be used to scan and enhance things within his field of vision, and can cross reference things that he sees against reference data stored in his implants.
The main weaknesses of these augmentations, are the weaknesses of all digital technology. They can be knocked offline and overloaded by things like power surges and electromagnetic pulses, and they are vulnerable themselves to hacking, virus's, and corrupt data.
Personality: [As Tales from the Borderlands is essentially a Choose your own adventure game, and there are a few places where you can lean on Rhys to make him more selfish/selfless, trusting/paranoid, humble/grand etc, but even if you play these to the hilt the core of his character remains pretty consistent. I'll make a note in my history section of the major choices I made - for the reference of potential future canonmates - But those choices don't massively sway his personality in my opinion.]
Rhys grew up like an octopus living in a shark tank. He learned to walk the walk, talk the talk, and grew up dreaming about the day that he'd be one of the ultra-powerful, borderline sociopathic corporate executives of the Hyperion Corporation. He describes a childhood where he started secret clubs with his friends just so that he'd have an excuse to print business cards. On the surface, this would suggest that he is driven by greed, ambition, and a ruthless hunger for power, but while he does posess these qualities - to one degree or another - rather than being his driving principals, they are the armour that he's built to survive inside the organization that is Hyperion. Right from the very beginning of the game, Rhys is introduced as a man who is deliberately faking the glibness and superiority that the corporation values in order to succeed, rather than someone who is at ease with these qualities.
So if the shark act is just an act, then what does motivate Rhys? If he doesn't fit in at Hyperion, then why is he trying so hard to make it to the top? The answer can be summed up in two words: Hero Worship.
Underneath all the grandstanding, Rhys is a wide eyed, awkward little nerd, prone to romanticising the world around him. In Hyperion, he idolizes Handsome Jack - the former company President - and his desire to emulate him is represented in everything from his hair, to the way he stands, to his long term goals within the company. We see this tendency for hero worship play out during the game as well, in his interactions with a mysterious and inhuman "Vault Hunter" named Zer0. While their encounters are brief, Rhys's admiration for Zer0 plunges him firmly into the territory of a stuttering fanboy, and he is left giddy and shy by the sight of the Vault Hunter in action. He is more guarded in showing his admiration for Handsome Jack during the game, but dialogue with his best friend Vaughn indicates that his devotion is just as intense.
There are certain qualities that Hyperion would appreciate, however, which Rhys has in droves. First and foremost, he has an ego, and a bit of a soft spot for the sound of his own voice. He's a good hacker and a relatively smooth talker, but he routinely overestimates his abilities and comes up short. He tries to take control of conversations where he doesn't really have anything to add, and he's willing to talk a big game, right up until his nerve fails him and he shifts back to begging for his life. The other quality which Rhys posesses, that enabled him to survive life in Hyperion, is a degree of overcommitment to his bad ideas which occasionally resembles courage. It's not that he's hard to scare (he's kind of jumpy and expressively squeamish, in fact) it's the fact that his fears don't stop him from being brazen. From taking risks and breaking rules and pissing people off in pursuit of his goals. It's a pretty dangerous quality to posess, and it's only saving grace is that the level of drive that comes with it means that Rhys keeps moving, even as his life becomes an ever lenthening string of disasters. He course corrects until he's heading in a completely different direction to the one he started in, but by god, he keeps going.
Perhaps part of the allure of Handsome Jack and Hyperion for him, is the idea that with enough of this inexhaustable drive, he can have it both ways. He can be like his heroes, be revered and remembered and important, but finally do it on his own terms. As an awkward, emotionally available dork who falls over a lot and thinks robots are better than people. He undergoes something of an awakening over the course of the game however, coming face to face with the ugly reality of one of his heroes, and having to confront the damage that was required to create his legacy. In the end, Rhys still wants his company, he still wants to do great things, but he doesn't want to build it on the same bodies that Hyperion was built on, and his eyes are open to the blood on his heroes hands. The combination of Rhys's disenchantment with his former hero, and his inexhaustible focus, is cystalised in one of the most striking scenes of the game, where Rhys severs his bionic arm, rips the port out of his temple, and cuts out his ECHO-eye, in order to free himself of the last ghost of Handsome Jack, preserved as an artificial intelligence whispering through his cybernetics.
Socially, Rhys generally plays pretty well with others, and tends to trust his friends more than they deserve. He has a close knit social circle within Hyperion, and he warms pretty quickly to the con-artists and criminals he meets on the planet of Pandora. Growing up in such an immoral society seems to have left him pretty non-judgemental when it comes to class and criminality, as he seems pretty relaxed about teaming up with people who should be his avowed enemies. There appears to be some degree of understanding that everyone is just trying to survive. He's a bit of a smart alec, and has a tendency to come across as smug and mouthy, but he shouldn't be mistaken isn't the kind of person who used humour to mask his pain. On the contrary, he's very open and vocal about his pain. Some would say whiny. Yes, he's kind of whiny.
Barge Reactions: As I mentioned above, Rhys is pretty adaptable. He's accustommed to living on a space station, and copes pretty well when flung into unexpected situations where everything is trying to kill him. As such, he'll probably deal pretty well on board the Barge. He won't be as concerned as some people with the larger moral problems of it, but he's not going to pretend they aren't there either. He comes from a scary, imperfect world, and there's no reason why the Barge shouldn't just be more of the same.
Breaches and floods, on the other hand, he'll probably find more disturbing. He's had a few close calls with losing his bodily autonomy, and while he's held up pretty well through them, it's not unrealistic to assume that he'll be carrying around a little residual anxiety about losing control of his own mind.
Deal: Rhys is working to rebuild the Atlas Corporation from the ground up, and the Admiral has offered him a data-bank that could lead him to every abandonned, hidden, and lost Atlas base on Pandora. Decades of research and technology there for the taking, that might change the fate of the entire planet. And he could get at it without leaving a trail of bodies behind him.
History: Wiki-Link!
Changable plot points:
This version of Rhys:
Told Vaughn about Jack's AI early on, but witheld the information from Sasha and Fiona.
Trusted Jack in the Atlas Facility.
Didn't hit on Sasha in the dome.
Didn't accept control of Hyperion from Jack.
Let Yvette escape.
Annnnnnnd, after ripping out his ECHO-eye, he did not destroy the AI of Handsome Jack.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video clicks on, and if you're an individual with a well tuned douchebag alarm, then it's probably going off right now. A young man in his late twenties fills the screen, with slicked back hair, and a clean cut, corportate look about him. His right eye gleams a bright, unnatural amber colour, and he flashes a wry, lopsided grin.]
Is it just me, or is the induction training for this place kind of non-existent? [He puts up his hands - revealing his left arm to be a silver and steel prosthetic - like he's trying to wave away an objection that hasn't been made yet.] I know, I know, it's my first day and I've got all the time in the world to complain later, but even my memories of taking this job are kind of dopamine cloudy right now and-- I just want to check: This is weird for everyone, right? I haven't just sidestepped into a parallell universe where this is considered universally good hiring practice?
[He lets his arms drop, then his expression shifts. From smug, to surprised, to slightly irritated.]
Oh-- Uh, hold up, lemme just-- just--
[He clicks something on the communicator, and for inmates, the screen goes black. That's because he just switched onto the...]
[Warden Filter]
Ugh, sorry about that, this interface is killing me. Why is nothing ECHO-compatible? I mean, what year are we living in, right?
Make that another note for the Admiral: Tech support. Get some.
[He laughs, and it's a douchey laugh, but there's something about it that's just a little... left of center. Like he's trying to laugh off an awkwardness or embarrassment that doesn't quite gel with the cool overconfidence he's shooting for here. The laugh ends with a clearing of his throat.]
In case it isn't clear from that, I'm a warden.
[Smooth.]
Sample RP:
61. That's all. There are 61 people living on board the ship. Rhys knows because he's been counting them. Making tallies in his head of humans, aliens, inmates and wardens (He doesn't think he's ever been anywhere before with more good guys than bad guys, but by his count that's what the Admiral's amassed here) and that's his current total. by his count, the ship could easily accommodate a few hundred, more still if they crashed in the common rooms instead of just the cabins, but as it is? The Barge is a great, sleek monster of a ship, tall, strange and - Compared to Helios and the towns of Pandora - almost empty.
Sometimes Rhys likes that about the place. It's given him time to learn the layout, figure out who to avoid in dark corridors, and the freedom to explore all the ship's weird nooks and crannies while waiting for the Admiral's questionable middle management skills to give him something to actually do. Other times, the long corridors of empty cabins become a little disqueting, and the quiet turns the smallest creak of the floorboards, or scuff of his shoes, into the monosyllabic mutters of a phantom voice, in the back of his head.
He's not stupid. He knows about hypervigilance and that his brain is wired to look for threats, and that the last six months has given him all sort of threats to be looking for. Usually when this happens, he just grits his teeth and carries on, but on this occasion, the tiny squeak of that phantom voice is too loud, too clear. Rhys spins on his heel and stares into the empty corridor.
"Who--" His voice is a good three octaves too high. He forces it down to a more butch and masculine frequency before trying again, "Who's out there? You're not slipping past me, I can hear you loud and clear!"
The corridor is silent. He scans around quickly with his echo eye, but it confirms what he already knows. There's no one there. And he's demanding answers from empty space. Rhys takes a deep breath, and taps himself on the side of the head, steel against skin, as if he can shake free the ghost in his machine that's conjuring these other spirits.
"Get it together, Rhys. This place has nothing on Pandora. It's fine. This is fine."
The words hang in the empty corridor. They don't make it fine. Rhys jerks open the door to his cabin, and retreats inside, determined to crank up his communicator, fire up Dumpy, and make as much noise as politely possible until the chill down his spine finally recedes.
Special Notes: One of the last decisions that you get to make in Tales From The Borderlands, is whether you want to destroy the hostile AI of Handsome Jack, or keep it trapped in Rhys's removed ECHO-eye. I'd like to play Rhys as having kept the AI, and I'd like him to have it, just, chilling on his desk or something on board the Barge (basically as a plot hook/potential inmate leverage/a horrible future event) and I wanted to check that it was okay with you guys?
As with all plotting, I would not use this AI as an excuse to do any janky shit that would effect other characters without talking it through with you guys first.
User DW:
E-mail:
Other Characters: none!
Character Name: Rhys
Series: Tales from the Borderlands
Age: We never get a confirmed age for Rhys, but his college besty is 27, so we'll go with around there.
From When?: After the game concludes.
Inmate/Warden: Warden - Over the course of Tales from the Boarderlands, Rhys goes through his own redemption arc of sorts. While he starts the game more oblivious than evil, he still goes from being an employee of a destructive arms company, who idolizes a ruthless psychopath, to a man trying to build something better, able to turn his back on power and willing to sacrifice to protect his friends. He doesn't come from a world of moral absolutes, and he still managed to evolve, grow, and stand up for something, even though it's hard. I think this would arm him to contend with inmates who might be going back to worlds where it's harder to be good than it is on the barge.
Item: A happy little bot named Dumpy...
Abilities/Powers: Rhys has three cyborg augmentations: A robotic arm, an ECHO-eye, and a port in his temple which he can connect to computers, mobile devices, and store data in.
All of his augmentations seem to work together, which suggests that they're all linked to his central nervous system. Data which goes in though his port can be accessed both through his echo eye, and via a mobile interface connected to his arm. He can synch both his eye and arm with wireless devices (usually robots) and control them remotely. With a little help from a rogue AI, he's able to hack into the compute systems of an entire base this way, and seize control of weapons and transport without tipping anyone off, but at the canon point I'm bringing him aboard from, he doesn't have any AI assistance, so would only be able to accomplish minor wireless hacking, or would need to link up to something in order to get control of it.
His robotic arm is much stronger and more durable than his normal arm, and his ECHO-eye can be used to scan and enhance things within his field of vision, and can cross reference things that he sees against reference data stored in his implants.
The main weaknesses of these augmentations, are the weaknesses of all digital technology. They can be knocked offline and overloaded by things like power surges and electromagnetic pulses, and they are vulnerable themselves to hacking, virus's, and corrupt data.
Personality: [As Tales from the Borderlands is essentially a Choose your own adventure game, and there are a few places where you can lean on Rhys to make him more selfish/selfless, trusting/paranoid, humble/grand etc, but even if you play these to the hilt the core of his character remains pretty consistent. I'll make a note in my history section of the major choices I made - for the reference of potential future canonmates - But those choices don't massively sway his personality in my opinion.]
Rhys grew up like an octopus living in a shark tank. He learned to walk the walk, talk the talk, and grew up dreaming about the day that he'd be one of the ultra-powerful, borderline sociopathic corporate executives of the Hyperion Corporation. He describes a childhood where he started secret clubs with his friends just so that he'd have an excuse to print business cards. On the surface, this would suggest that he is driven by greed, ambition, and a ruthless hunger for power, but while he does posess these qualities - to one degree or another - rather than being his driving principals, they are the armour that he's built to survive inside the organization that is Hyperion. Right from the very beginning of the game, Rhys is introduced as a man who is deliberately faking the glibness and superiority that the corporation values in order to succeed, rather than someone who is at ease with these qualities.
So if the shark act is just an act, then what does motivate Rhys? If he doesn't fit in at Hyperion, then why is he trying so hard to make it to the top? The answer can be summed up in two words: Hero Worship.
Underneath all the grandstanding, Rhys is a wide eyed, awkward little nerd, prone to romanticising the world around him. In Hyperion, he idolizes Handsome Jack - the former company President - and his desire to emulate him is represented in everything from his hair, to the way he stands, to his long term goals within the company. We see this tendency for hero worship play out during the game as well, in his interactions with a mysterious and inhuman "Vault Hunter" named Zer0. While their encounters are brief, Rhys's admiration for Zer0 plunges him firmly into the territory of a stuttering fanboy, and he is left giddy and shy by the sight of the Vault Hunter in action. He is more guarded in showing his admiration for Handsome Jack during the game, but dialogue with his best friend Vaughn indicates that his devotion is just as intense.
There are certain qualities that Hyperion would appreciate, however, which Rhys has in droves. First and foremost, he has an ego, and a bit of a soft spot for the sound of his own voice. He's a good hacker and a relatively smooth talker, but he routinely overestimates his abilities and comes up short. He tries to take control of conversations where he doesn't really have anything to add, and he's willing to talk a big game, right up until his nerve fails him and he shifts back to begging for his life. The other quality which Rhys posesses, that enabled him to survive life in Hyperion, is a degree of overcommitment to his bad ideas which occasionally resembles courage. It's not that he's hard to scare (he's kind of jumpy and expressively squeamish, in fact) it's the fact that his fears don't stop him from being brazen. From taking risks and breaking rules and pissing people off in pursuit of his goals. It's a pretty dangerous quality to posess, and it's only saving grace is that the level of drive that comes with it means that Rhys keeps moving, even as his life becomes an ever lenthening string of disasters. He course corrects until he's heading in a completely different direction to the one he started in, but by god, he keeps going.
Perhaps part of the allure of Handsome Jack and Hyperion for him, is the idea that with enough of this inexhaustable drive, he can have it both ways. He can be like his heroes, be revered and remembered and important, but finally do it on his own terms. As an awkward, emotionally available dork who falls over a lot and thinks robots are better than people. He undergoes something of an awakening over the course of the game however, coming face to face with the ugly reality of one of his heroes, and having to confront the damage that was required to create his legacy. In the end, Rhys still wants his company, he still wants to do great things, but he doesn't want to build it on the same bodies that Hyperion was built on, and his eyes are open to the blood on his heroes hands. The combination of Rhys's disenchantment with his former hero, and his inexhaustible focus, is cystalised in one of the most striking scenes of the game, where Rhys severs his bionic arm, rips the port out of his temple, and cuts out his ECHO-eye, in order to free himself of the last ghost of Handsome Jack, preserved as an artificial intelligence whispering through his cybernetics.
Socially, Rhys generally plays pretty well with others, and tends to trust his friends more than they deserve. He has a close knit social circle within Hyperion, and he warms pretty quickly to the con-artists and criminals he meets on the planet of Pandora. Growing up in such an immoral society seems to have left him pretty non-judgemental when it comes to class and criminality, as he seems pretty relaxed about teaming up with people who should be his avowed enemies. There appears to be some degree of understanding that everyone is just trying to survive. He's a bit of a smart alec, and has a tendency to come across as smug and mouthy, but he shouldn't be mistaken isn't the kind of person who used humour to mask his pain. On the contrary, he's very open and vocal about his pain. Some would say whiny. Yes, he's kind of whiny.
Barge Reactions: As I mentioned above, Rhys is pretty adaptable. He's accustommed to living on a space station, and copes pretty well when flung into unexpected situations where everything is trying to kill him. As such, he'll probably deal pretty well on board the Barge. He won't be as concerned as some people with the larger moral problems of it, but he's not going to pretend they aren't there either. He comes from a scary, imperfect world, and there's no reason why the Barge shouldn't just be more of the same.
Breaches and floods, on the other hand, he'll probably find more disturbing. He's had a few close calls with losing his bodily autonomy, and while he's held up pretty well through them, it's not unrealistic to assume that he'll be carrying around a little residual anxiety about losing control of his own mind.
Deal: Rhys is working to rebuild the Atlas Corporation from the ground up, and the Admiral has offered him a data-bank that could lead him to every abandonned, hidden, and lost Atlas base on Pandora. Decades of research and technology there for the taking, that might change the fate of the entire planet. And he could get at it without leaving a trail of bodies behind him.
History: Wiki-Link!
Changable plot points:
This version of Rhys:
Told Vaughn about Jack's AI early on, but witheld the information from Sasha and Fiona.
Trusted Jack in the Atlas Facility.
Didn't hit on Sasha in the dome.
Didn't accept control of Hyperion from Jack.
Let Yvette escape.
Annnnnnnd, after ripping out his ECHO-eye, he did not destroy the AI of Handsome Jack.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video clicks on, and if you're an individual with a well tuned douchebag alarm, then it's probably going off right now. A young man in his late twenties fills the screen, with slicked back hair, and a clean cut, corportate look about him. His right eye gleams a bright, unnatural amber colour, and he flashes a wry, lopsided grin.]
Is it just me, or is the induction training for this place kind of non-existent? [He puts up his hands - revealing his left arm to be a silver and steel prosthetic - like he's trying to wave away an objection that hasn't been made yet.] I know, I know, it's my first day and I've got all the time in the world to complain later, but even my memories of taking this job are kind of dopamine cloudy right now and-- I just want to check: This is weird for everyone, right? I haven't just sidestepped into a parallell universe where this is considered universally good hiring practice?
[He lets his arms drop, then his expression shifts. From smug, to surprised, to slightly irritated.]
Oh-- Uh, hold up, lemme just-- just--
[He clicks something on the communicator, and for inmates, the screen goes black. That's because he just switched onto the...]
[Warden Filter]
Ugh, sorry about that, this interface is killing me. Why is nothing ECHO-compatible? I mean, what year are we living in, right?
Make that another note for the Admiral: Tech support. Get some.
[He laughs, and it's a douchey laugh, but there's something about it that's just a little... left of center. Like he's trying to laugh off an awkwardness or embarrassment that doesn't quite gel with the cool overconfidence he's shooting for here. The laugh ends with a clearing of his throat.]
In case it isn't clear from that, I'm a warden.
[Smooth.]
Sample RP:
61. That's all. There are 61 people living on board the ship. Rhys knows because he's been counting them. Making tallies in his head of humans, aliens, inmates and wardens (He doesn't think he's ever been anywhere before with more good guys than bad guys, but by his count that's what the Admiral's amassed here) and that's his current total. by his count, the ship could easily accommodate a few hundred, more still if they crashed in the common rooms instead of just the cabins, but as it is? The Barge is a great, sleek monster of a ship, tall, strange and - Compared to Helios and the towns of Pandora - almost empty.
Sometimes Rhys likes that about the place. It's given him time to learn the layout, figure out who to avoid in dark corridors, and the freedom to explore all the ship's weird nooks and crannies while waiting for the Admiral's questionable middle management skills to give him something to actually do. Other times, the long corridors of empty cabins become a little disqueting, and the quiet turns the smallest creak of the floorboards, or scuff of his shoes, into the monosyllabic mutters of a phantom voice, in the back of his head.
He's not stupid. He knows about hypervigilance and that his brain is wired to look for threats, and that the last six months has given him all sort of threats to be looking for. Usually when this happens, he just grits his teeth and carries on, but on this occasion, the tiny squeak of that phantom voice is too loud, too clear. Rhys spins on his heel and stares into the empty corridor.
"Who--" His voice is a good three octaves too high. He forces it down to a more butch and masculine frequency before trying again, "Who's out there? You're not slipping past me, I can hear you loud and clear!"
The corridor is silent. He scans around quickly with his echo eye, but it confirms what he already knows. There's no one there. And he's demanding answers from empty space. Rhys takes a deep breath, and taps himself on the side of the head, steel against skin, as if he can shake free the ghost in his machine that's conjuring these other spirits.
"Get it together, Rhys. This place has nothing on Pandora. It's fine. This is fine."
The words hang in the empty corridor. They don't make it fine. Rhys jerks open the door to his cabin, and retreats inside, determined to crank up his communicator, fire up Dumpy, and make as much noise as politely possible until the chill down his spine finally recedes.
Special Notes: One of the last decisions that you get to make in Tales From The Borderlands, is whether you want to destroy the hostile AI of Handsome Jack, or keep it trapped in Rhys's removed ECHO-eye. I'd like to play Rhys as having kept the AI, and I'd like him to have it, just, chilling on his desk or something on board the Barge (basically as a plot hook/potential inmate leverage/a horrible future event) and I wanted to check that it was okay with you guys?
As with all plotting, I would not use this AI as an excuse to do any janky shit that would effect other characters without talking it through with you guys first.
