[application] ataraxion

[idiotball]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Siri
OOC Journal: hearyourghost / mynabird
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Negative, Ghost Rider.
Email + IM: hopeforrent[at]gmail
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Caleb St. Clair + Gibson

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Stephen fucking Hart
Canon: Primeval
Original or Alternate Universe: AU, sort of. Essentially. It's complicated. I WILL EXPLAIN.
Canon Point: Mid-1.06, just before his universe goes kersplodey.
Number: 009

Setting: Primeval Wiki on Stephen and on Series 1
History:

Stephen's past is very sketchily outlined, and he never really discusses it in the show. The only real pieces of information we have about his background come from the official bios provided by ITV—which reveal that Stephen's degree is actually in Zoology and that he was a Junior Olympian in both fencing and riflery, implying that his family was relatively well-off. His family also didn't show up at his funeral in season two, which would seem to indicate some kind of very deep rift between Stephen and the rest of his family.

In-show, Stephen was mentioned as working with Professor Nick Cutter for approximately eight years, and he also had an extremely ill-advised affair with Helen Cutter some time before her disappearance. Beyond that, however, we don't get anything about his history before the start of the series.

Moving on to the stuff that actually happened on the show!

In 2006, holes in time and space, which tend to appear and disappear at irregular intervals, start showing up all over the UK. Not only do these anomalies, as they're later dubbed, resemble giant floating sparklesnowflakes… but they also open into eras that have a rather alarming tendency to release large things with nasty sharp pointy teeth into the middle of modern-day England. It's the kind of problem that requires expert handling, preferably from a crack team of SAS troops and/or government scientists.

Unfortunately, what the problem got was a professor of evolutionary zoology and his lab technician, an assistant zookeeper, and a graduate student who wrote his dissertation on how all life on Earth is descended from aliens.

The Home Office would have really preferred someone more senior on the case—or at least someone with a PhD—but unfortunately, Professor Nick Cutter was the first person to really investigate the anomalies, was tenacious enough not to give in at the first sign of bullying, and had enough functional knowledge about prehistoric creatures to be the closest thing to an "expert" they could find. (He also had a vested interest in the anomalies themselves, as—once he knew they existed—he began to suspect they had a hand in his wife's disappearance eight years ago, but the pre-screening process didn't really catch onto that.)

Stephen is Cutter's lab technician—although frankly, "lab technician" is kind of a misnomer, since he pretty much does All The Things for Cutter even before they end up hunting dinosaurs for a living. Stephen and Cutter are the only members of the team to actually know each other prior to the start of the show, and they've known each other for long enough—at least eight years, given… certain information that comes to light in episode 1.06—that they're really more like friends than colleagues.

Stephen and Cutter—as well as Abby Maitland, an assistant zookeeper and reptile expert; Connor Temple, the team's tech geek and one of Cutter's grad students; and Capt. Ryan, a redshirt SAS captain—end up working for the Home Office under the purview of Sir James Lester, a "government hatchet man" who appears to be made of pure sarcasm, and Claudia Brown, a junior Home Office official who happened to be at the site of the first anomaly at the same time as Cutter. Lester makes no bones about the fact that he doesn't really like the team, for a number of reasons; they're disorganized, unprofessional, unpredictable… essentially, they're not the SAS, and it bothers Lester immensely. Claudia, on the other hand, is torn between being on the team's side and trying to do her job… for the most part, anyway, and her loyalties are complicated slightly by the fact that she's Cutter's designated love interest.

Anyway, the team essentially wanders around from anomaly sighting to anomaly sighting, getting into ridiculous love triangles, making stupid mistakes, and occasionally getting shit done purely by accident. Stephen is the only reliably competent member of the field team, since he's got ridiculous amounts of field expertise and is the only one on the team who appears to really know how to fire a gun. Even he gets distracted by stupid things occasionally, though—and also bitten by prehistoric spiders and given magic amnesia. The whole first season of Primeval is really a guide on how not to deal with potential holes in the time-space continuum, to be perfectly honest.

The ridiculous love triangles are as follows, if anyone's actually interested.

1. Connor likes Abby, who likes Stephen, who has a girlfriend who lives in Canada the Amazon—and who likes Abby back, except when he doesn't. Abby and Connor also live together.

2. Claudia likes Cutter, who used to be married to Helen, who used to secretly sleep with Stephen.

The important thing to take away from all of this, of course, is that Cutter and Stephen are practically married.

At the very end of the season one finale, Helen Cutter—who's been working with the team off-and-on throughout the season, although her motivations are, for the most part, unclear—essentially uses baby Future Predators (who are kind of like the unholy future offspring of a bat and a xenomorph) to try and find an anomaly leading to the future rather than the past. Since the future anomaly led through an anomaly in the Permian era, however, she and Cutter go back into the past in order to let the baby Future Predators use echolocation in order to find the anomaly that leads back to their time. (Another note on the setting: Primeval science makes no goddamn sense.)

When they get back from their (unsuccessful) mission, in which the SAS captain dies and Helen and Cutter close a stable time loop that's existed since the beginning of Season One, it's hilariously apparent to Helen that Cutter has gotten over her and fallen in love with Claudia Brown. In a fit of petty, manipulative jealousy, Helen then invites Stephen to go live with her in the past, thereby revealing that—oops—she and Stephen had an affair under Cutter's nose before she disappeared for the first time. Stephen refuses, for obvious reasons, and Helen disappears back into the past.

Unfortunately, the hideous consequences don't end there. Two of the baby Future Predators actually escaped into the Permian era, which has repercussions for the entire universe. Although no one realizes it until after Helen disappears into the anomaly again, Claudia Brown has actually completely disappeared from the universe as a result of the changes brought about by the Future Predators. In addition, the team is now part of a much larger collective of operatives located in the Anomaly Research Center (which is still run by the Home Office). Presumably there are other changes that happened as a result of the universe-shift, but they're never really elaborated on in canon—save for one. Although Claudia doesn't exist any more, the team takes on a PR representative at the end of 2.01: a woman named Jenny Lewis, who (gasp!) looks exactly like Claudia Brown, but with darker hair and a personality transplant. (Cutter, unsurprisingly, doesn't take this too well, but he learns to just deal with it.)

None of this is really relevant to this version of Stephen, since he's taken from before that little bombshell and thus is from the "original" Primeval universe. In-show, however, the season-one universe is treated as some sort of weird alternate by everyone but Cutter, so Stephen will likely be seen as an alternate-universe version of himself by any non-season-one castrates.

Personality:

When Stephen first appears onscreen, he initially appears to be Professor Cutter's hyper-competent sidekick… and not much else. Although there's an element of truth to that description—as James Murray put it in an interview, "Cutter is the cerebral one of the partnership, the one who sort of decides what they're going to do, and Stephen is the one who actually does it"—it's not entirely accurate. He spends much of his screentime time bitchfacing in a corner during the first episode; he's got clearly got an opinion on what's going on, even though he doesn't exactly feel the need to share it with the class—mostly because he's aware that making snide comments isn't actually going to help things. Later, however, it becomes apparent that Cutter and Stephen are more like friends than colleagues; it's implied that they've been on all kinds of wonderful adventures before canon starts, and Cutter clearly values Stephen's opinion—when he chooses to actually voice it, anyway. To put it in TV Tropes terms, he's really The Lancer rather than The Sidekick.

Stephen's also a lot more personable than you'd expect from his first appearance. Although he's never exactly the chatty sort, he's friendly enough that it isn't totally impossible to carry on a conversation with him… even if that conversation tends to be pretty blunt and heavily tempered by deadpan snarking. He's also got an unexpectedly wicked sense of humor; he's not above making people uncomfortable for his own amusement if the opportunity presents itself, and usually the only indication that he might even be joking is the occasional smirk. (He also has chemistry with just about every person to walk onscreen, although that's less a personality trait and more a function of James Murray being a very attractive human being—but I digress.)

He's not as pure a scientist as Cutter (or even Connor), but Stephen excels at finding practical solutions to very immediate problems—such as "oh god there's a prehistoric nasty thing with too many teeth trying to eat a couple of SAS members and Cutter, wat do". He's very, very good at thinking on his feet and improvising, especially when it comes to weaponry (cars, fire extinguishers, bookshelves, pens, copy machines, and makeshift flamethrowers are all fair game to Stephen), and his ability to keep a ridiculously cool head in a crisis just means that he ends up being hideously effective when it counts.

Quite frankly, Stephen's the only member of the team with any kind of common sense during Season One. Cutter is too distracted by trying to find his missing wife (and then trying to track her down once he's realized she's alive and capable of visiting the present), Connor is too much of a derp to have any sense, and Abby is put in the damsel-in-distress role too often to really do any good, so the job of making sure no one gets their ass killed mainly falls to Stephen. He's pretty effective at it, too, although it's usually a tossup as to whether or not anyone actually listens to him. (This common sense of Stephen's goes straight out the window in the tail end of Season Two, thanks to Helen's influence, but… well, let's just chalk that up to the Idiot Ball unfortunate alternate-universe shenanigans, shall we?)

Although Stephen is closest to Cutter, for obvious reasons, he quickly developed a rapport with the other two members of the field team. Although initially Stephen perceived working with Connor as babysitting rather than anything actually productive, since then he's almost adopted Connor as a sort of little-brother figure. He'd look out for Connor anyway, since it's his job to make sure no one's stupid enough to get themselves eaten by dinosaurs, but Stephen's relaxed enough around Connor to tease the hell out of the kid. He even ends up giving Connor romantic advice at one point... although that's a terrible plan on Connor's end, since Stephen's attempts at romantic relationships are, in a word, disastrous. Stephen and Abby are... more complicated, since the first season starts out with them being set up as love interests—but that plot is essentially forgotten after the third episode, chalked up as essentially a fever-dream and a crush for Stephen and Abby respectively, which leaves them as just friends and colleagues. He respects the fact that both of them are actually good at their jobs (when things aren't going horribly awry), although he wishes Connor would learn to actually think things through and that Abby would keep the snakes awaaaaay from him.

He's also fiercely, often slightly irrationally loyal to people he cares about. He stuck with Cutter for at least eight years, working as his lab technician despite being obviously capable of taking another, better job, and he's willing to rush headlong into danger if it means he can keep someone he cares about from doing something really stupid. This is possibly the only set of circumstances in which Stephen will really stop being sensible; idiotic bravery clearly supersedes self-preservation instincts for him, especially when it comes to Cutter. He'd obviously prefer that things not get to a point where he has to go rescue someone, but if he has to? He has no problems turning into a Big Damn Hero temporarily and saving people from their own stupidity.

tl;dr: Deadpan Snarker Only Sane Man Combat Pragmatist with a definite Hero Complex.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

OUTDOORSINESS He has, canonically, tracked wounded animals through the rainforest for ten days at a time, and he's the guy to find if you want to not die in the wilderness.
GUNS Stephen is essentially his team's firearms expert—well, if you ignore the SAS captain. (Don't worry, everyone else does too.) He routinely goes armed on missions, which is a big deal when you're traipsing around the UK (where handguns are illegal and rifles are very, very heavily regulated) looking for prehistoric nasty things, and he used to be an Olympic-level marksman. Oh, and he's got an rather considerable, highly illegal weapons cache in the trunk of his car. Yep.
COMMON SENSE Stephen basically functions as Cutter's voice of reason and rationality… and everyone else's, too, to be perfectly honest.
BADASSERY Stephen's superpower is basically sheer unadulterated awesome. He hits rampaging Gorgonopsids with cars and doesn't afraid of anything—and then he shoots it a few times, just to be sure. (And yes, that is a giant prehistoric scorpion that he tethered to a concrete bridge—all by himself, by shooting it with the harpoon gun that he keeps in the trunk of his car. Stephen doesn't screw around when it comes to the creatures, okay.)

CIVILIAN He's a civilian who's really really good with guns, but he's still very much not a soldier.
IDEALISM This wouldn't normally be a weakness, but it means that if you know what buttons to push? Stephen's actually pretty easy to manipulate.
ETHICS Even though he's a good shot, he still doesn't shoot living things unless he has a damn good reason—and even then, he's never shot something human-shaped. He'd really prefer to keep it that way.
LYING He might be good at outright ignoring topics he doesn't want to talk about, but Stephen is a terribad liar.
HOW I SHOT ROMANCE Stephen's misadventures in relationships (dude slept with his best friend/professor's manipulative, slightly insane wife—and then wondered why things went horribly awry when he decided to listen to her in Season Two) are significant enough to be called a weakness.
FUCKING SNAKES Seriously, Stephen is Indiana Jones in all but name—up to and including the fear of snakes.

LIMITATIONS n/a. He's just a normal human guy in his early thirties, and a civilian to boot (albeit a civilian with an uncanny level of familiarity with firearms).

Inventory:

one (1) SIG Sauer P229, with concealed-carry holster
    two (2) magazines of .357 SIG bullets (24 total)
one (1) ID+Home Office security pass, issued to Stephen James Hart.
one (1) Spice Girls mug
one (1) typical Stephenish outfit, complete with hideous purple plaid button-down shirt

Appearance:

Stephen stands about 6'1", with blue eyes and dark brown hair in a permanent state of bedhead. His taste in clothes trends more towards "functional" than "fashionable", and he pretty much lives in jeans or cargo pants, flannel shirts, and henleys. This is a pretty good picture of his face—and it includes the hideous purple plaid shirt! This one gives a better sense of his body type (aka tall and athletic, if a bit on the rangy side).

Age: 31

AU Clarification:

Not only is Stephen from a universe that is completely tangential to the rest of the Primeval seasons (and that quite possibly doesn't even exist any more) but he is also arriving on the Tranquility fresh off a space station called Sacrosanct.

Isn't his life grand.

Stephen didn't spend a terribly long time on Sacrosanct, but he was there long enough to get a sense of the place and adjust to the idea of actually being in space—and to go exploring in the garden zones a bit, because Stephen has Priorities. When he first arrived, the only person he recognized on the station was Connor Temple… who was extremely relieved to see him, and more than a little cagey about why. He also mentioned something called the ARC and introduced Stephen to the idea that they weren't necessarily from the same point in time, which is an assumption he will (accurately) be running with on the Tranquility. Abby Maitland and Rex also showed up, briefly, and then they all moved into an apartment together, thanks to Connor's ability to HACK ALL THE THINGS.

He also ended up going a bit temporarily loopy on drell hallucinogens, thanks to Thane Krios getting dumped into the station's water supply due to Shenanigans. Essentially, he ended trip-sitting Abby and Connor while also tripping pretty badly himself. It was not the most fun experience he had ever had in his life.

tl;dr: this CR AU is really just going to acclimate him to the idea that he's in SPACE much faster than he ordinarily would, since he just spent about three weeks on a space station run by a crazy AI named Hypatia. More information about Sacrosanct—and Singularity in general— can be found here!

SAMPLES
Log Sample:

[shamelessly repurposed from his Singularity application.]

If you told Stephen Hart two and a half months ago that his job description would very shortly include "hunting prehistoric creatures in the middle of London" and "unraveling the mysteries of the time-space continuum", he'd have laughed in your face. If you told him a week ago that he'd be tracking down hyperevolved bats from the future at the behest of Helen Cutter, his friend's missing ex-wife, he'd have just sighed and made sure the oscilloscope was somewhere within easy reach, since no one else was going to bother. If you told him that morning that he'd end up being thrown head-first into a junkyard in the middle of a giant space station that afternoon… well, he'd have just rolled his eyes and told you to get back to work, Connor, because your paperwork isn't going to do itself.

Unfortunately, all of those things actually happened… even the one about being unceremoniously dumped in the middle of what looked like the rubbish bin from hell. One second, he was stepping into the truck, getting ready to head to the latest anomaly sighting. The next, he was landing face-first in a pile of plush velociraptors—and really, he was quite aware of how ironic that was, thanks very much.

"Always nice to know the universe has a sense of humor," Stephen muttered, pushing himself up and starting to brush himself off—before promptly getting whacked on the back of the head with something smallish and heavy. He managed to catch whatever-it-was before it hit the ground, whirling around and looking accusingly at the… Spice Girls mug. The Spice Girls mug that bore a truly uncanny resemblance to the one in his kitchen cabinet.

All right, now someone was actively fucking with him.

Stephen just sighed, massaging the sore spot on the back of his head with his free hand, and looked down at the mountain of junk, trying to determine the best way to get back to the ground. He'd check to make sure he wasn't concussed later—although he didn't think it was likely, it never hurt to make sure—but for now, it was probably a good idea to get out of the anomaly's way until he could figure out a way to re-enter it and go back home.

… it was an anomaly, right?

Comms Sample:

[voice]

[surprise, tranquility! did you want another english guy onboard? well, congratulations, you've got one now. his voice is slightly hoarse and incredibly unamused, and no you do not get to see his face.]

Oh, for Christ's sake. Is this one of the teleporter malfunctions I've heard so much about? If it is, it would be nice if someone could point me in the direction of the nearest teleporter.

Preferably one without all the goo in it this time.