Application - Soulgemmed

[savedover]

Player name: Silvie
Contact info: relares or the wonder twit on AIM
Other characters currently played: N/A

Character name: Silver
Age: Physically, 13; Mentally, Much Older Than 13
Canon: Pokémon GSC (AU)
Canonpoint: Shortly after the 156th reset, in the first moments of the 157th loop.

Background:

Bulbapedia Page. Please note that he's taken from the GSC games instead of the HGSS remakes. I do take a couple of plot elements from HGSS (most importantly the confirmation that Silver is Giovanni's son and the identities of the Rocket Admins) but, otherwise, he's strictly a Generation 2 character.
AU Information This post includes general information about the AU Silver comes from. Below, I'll discuss Silver's personal role in the story.

• Silver grew up as the son of Giovanni, raised to be the next heir to Team Rocket. His childhood was isolated and lonely, as his father was secretive and wanted him kept out of the public eye. He was watched over by a constantly-changing group of Grunts and Admins, none of which who stayed long enough for him to form a lasting bond with. The only person he cared for was his father, whom he greatly admired. He was taught to value strength and abhor weakness; that people and Pokémon both existed to be used and that he should leave no room in his life for the weak.


• When he was ten years old, the unthinkable happened: his unbeatable father was defeated by some unknown child. And instead of fighting back to reclaim his title, Giovanni ran away and abandoned everything he had worked to build with Team Rocket—including Silver. Equal parts furious and confused, Silver swore that he would never, ever be like his father. To Silver, Giovanni had suddenly transformed from an invincible figure to a coward who only pretended to be strong in front of a crowd of weak people. From that day forward, Silver decided that he wouldn't rely on anyone's strength but his own.


• Three years pass. By wits, tricks and thievery, Silver managed to slip out of reach of the remnants of Team Rocket and the authorities looking for him. At some point, he disappeared from Kanto and slipped into the neighboring Region of Johto. After hearing about the famous Elm Laboratory in New Bark Town, Silver decided to steal a "strong" Pokémon from the professor. While lurking around the lab, he has a chance encounter with the one person who will have the strongest influence on his life: Gold. After stealing a Pokémon, the two end up as rivals. Gold becomes someone Silver absolutely must surpass in his goal to become the strongest.


• The events of Pokémon Gold happen over the course of one year. Because of his defeats at the hands of Gold, who he saw as weak-hearted and sentimental, and Lance, who was undeniably strong and equally sentimental, Silver's attitude towards his own Pokémon began to warm and soften as he learned to trust them as partners instead of treating them like tools.


• After traveling to Mt. Silver in search of Red, the "strongest" Trainer, Gold becomes infected by a MissingNo. and resets for the first time. Like many people, Silver is not aware of what's happening. The loop persists for an unknown amount of "time".


• Eventually, however, Silver begins to be plagued by a strong sense of déjà vu: new places are oddly familiar to him, he has an innate sense of where and when he will next see Gold, and he knows exactly how to navigate the supposedly-secret bases of Team Rocket. The longer the year goes on, the more frazzled Silver's nerves become. He begins to doubt his own memory, as he is certain that he has forgotten something important. Fearful of forgetting, he begins to keep a detailed journal of his experiences.


• One year to the date after he stole his first Pokémon—(a serious, highly persistent female Totodile)—on an otherwise completely ordinary day, the world cracks, shatters, and falls to pieces. Although Silver tries to outrun the distortion, there's no escaping the growing roar of static. This is the first reset he can remember.


• When the world comes back together again, everything is wrong. Instead of being at the Dragon's Den, Silver finds himself, thoughts foggy and disoriented, standing in front of Professor Elm's laboratory. When he looks through the window, he can see a table with three Pokéballs sitting on it. When Gold approaches Silver, he doesn't recognize them. Silver is forced to acknowledge the inexplicable, horrifying reality of what has happened: somehow, time has reset" to the day when he first stole Totodile. After Gold is given a Cyndaquil, not sure of what else he should do, Silver steals a Totodile. It's not the same Totodile he remembers. This one is a hot-tempered, lonely male. The Totodile that he raised into a Feraligatr is gone, as if she never even existed.


• They don't have much time together. Silver, unsettled and afraid, forgets to wait for Gold in Cherrygrove City. When he misses his cue, the world cracks, shatters, and falls to pieces. When it comes back together again, Silver finds himself standing in front of Professor Elm's laboratory.


• Silver learns, very quickly, that there are many things about the year that cannot be changed. There are places he needs to be, battles he needs to lose, and things he needs to say. He faithfully recreates, as best as he can remember, the year that was erased. One year to the date after he stole his third Totodile, a gentle male who liked to eat, the world cracks, shatters, and falls to pieces. When it comes back together, he finds himself standing in front of Professor Elm's laboratory for the fourth time.


• The first resets Silver can remember are a series of trials and errors, as he memorizes the "script" of the year. He continues to keep a journal, although now he writes down where he needs to go, when he needs to be there, and what he's supposed to say. He also begins to keep a record of every Cyndaquil, Totodile, or Chikorita he steals. While he's able to find and reconnect with his other five Pokémon each time, his "first" Pokémon always disappears when the year is reset. In Silver's mind, if he can't remember them, it would be the same as if they never existed at all.


• Silver tries, over and over again, to reach out to Gold. Although Gold isn't someone he feels comfortable thinking of as a friend, he is someone who Silver has come to begrudgingly respect as a Trainer and as a person. He never manages to reach him. When conversations don't stay on script, much like how any time Silver manages to get the upper hand in battles, time gets funny; it rewinds and restarts, as if it never happened at all. Eventually, Silver gives up on getting through to Gold.


• After coming to the realization that it's pointless to try and rely on anyone but himself, Silver refocuses his attention to the resets themselves. Why were they happening? How was it even possible? Where did they come from? Between his appearances, he studies voraciously. He tests the absolute limits of what he is allowed at to do. And, at the end of every year, he tries to follow the spreading cracks and distortion back to their source. He fails, many times. But in the last moments of the 156th reset, Silver finally succeeds. He finds Gold on the barren summit of Mt. Silver, smiling hazily in the last moments before the year starts over again. The last thing he hears, before the world falls apart is: "Do better next time."


• When the world comes together again, he finds himself standing in front of Professor Elm's Laboratory.

Personality: Silver is not a nice person. On the contrary, he’s downright mean. At his best, he comes off as prickly and bad-tempered; at his worst, he’s needlessly cruel. He's combative and argumentative in conversation, constantly needling other people with critical comments and insults. He’s a petty thief who’s used to surviving by taking from others; moreover, he shows no real remorse for the people he steals from.

Most of this attitude comes from the fact that Silver doesn’t trust or like working with others. He prefers to keep people at an arms length and being nasty is an effective strategy towards that end. There are two kinds of people in the world to Silver: weak-willed, sentimental idiots and those that take advantage of them. His suspicious nature, coupled with an adamant desire not to rely on anyone, makes it very difficult for him to work with others.

Silver is an intensely private person who prefers to give out as little information about himself as he can get away with. Getting his name can be a struggle, let alone anything like his hobbies or secrets. The biggest of which happens to be that, in most cases, his bark is much worse than his bite. Silver puts a great deal of work into his affectations of being a cold, cruel person who doesn’t care about anyone but himself. While he often struggles with apathy, he cares deeply for the things that matter to him.

A long time ago, a clumsy boy helped teach Silver that what was holding from becoming a stronger Trainer was his inability to trust his Pokémon. Silver has a place in his stony little heart for each and every Pokémon he’s ever raised; even if it would be easier for him to close himself off again, he can’t let himself forget the difficult lessons he learned the first time he experienced the year. Although still reserved and strict, he's remarkably calm and patient with them in private. He can talk a mean game about them, but his actions don't match up with his words. His partners mean the world to him and, with every reset, the loss of his starters weighs heavily on him.

The resets have had a profound effect on the way Silver thinks and behaves. He has gotten better control of his temper; although easily irritated in day-to-day conversation, he knows how to clamp down on his feelings and set them aside long enough to accomplish his goals. He's also much more patient than he used to be—another hard-earned lesson, when being hours and days early is infinitely preferable to everything starting over because he was twenty minutes late. Although he was always someone who valued efficiency and results, being trapped in a time loop has made those preferences fixations.

Unsurprisingly, his greatest obsession is with time. After all, the loop only lasts for 12 months—364 days, 8,760 hours. Silver is obsessed with knowing and keeping track of the time; he wears no less than three watches and carries a pocket watch with him at all times, although he trusts none of them. He's learned to focus his background thoughts to a steady, reliable count of the seconds, minutes, and hours; counting helps him to keep calm when stressed and gives him something to focus on when he's too tired to do anything else. Which he often is, as a habitual insomniac.

One of Silver's sorest spots is the fact that he cannot completely ignore physical needs like sleeping and eating. For someone who loathes wasting time, the idea that he should spend 2,848 of his 8,760 hours lying around unconscious is an outrageous waste of time. He's a habitual insomniac who constantly pushes his physical limits, staying awake for as long as physically possible; he sleeps either in brief snatches or long 10-12 hour periods when he runs out of stamina and crashes.

His most defining trait, something that has been true him since before he was even aware of the resets, is the fact that he is incredibly stubborn. Even more than that, Silver is doggedly tenacious—because once he sets his mind to a task, you’d have to pry it out of his cold, dead fingers before he gives up on it. When faced with insurmountable losses, Silver clenches his jaw and soldiers on. It’s that unbending iron will of his, combined with his good memory, that has allowed him to remember each reset: to him, forgetting is simply not an option. As much as it helps him, his rigid stubbornness also holds him back; because it's so difficult to change his mind once it's been made up, he's very bad at considering other options and struggles with thinking outside the box.

Before the resets, Silver had a good memory; picking up on patterns and recalling things has always been easy for him. Gold's loops have refined and honed this skill to a razor sharp edge. He's put to memory a complex schedule events, so he can accurately predict Gold's movements and know where he needs to be; a "script" of things he needs to say at each of their encounters; and a list of every starter Pokémon he has lost to the resets. One of the first things he does at the beginning of the loop is transcribe these things in a notebook, which he obsessively reads and rereads to keep the text fresh in his mind.

Silver has been stuck for a long, long time. In some ways, he hasn’t changed much from the bad-tempered child who stole his first Pokémon because it never occurred to him that he could just ask for one; in others, he finds that he’s changed so much that he can barely recognize himself. The longer he stubbornly continues to remember, the more pointless and hopeless everything seems. But, at this point, it's far too late for him to go back. Now that he knows, he will never let himself forget the truth about the resets.

Wish: "I want to see Gold disappear."

Kyuubey appeared in front of Silver just moments after he had learned a fact that, while it made a sickening amount of sense, changed everything he understood about the time loop he was trapped in. The resets weren't some sort of horrifying, but ultimately senseless, supernatural disaster: he now has someone whose fault it is, who he can blame for everything. And it's not just some all-knowing stranger—it's ignorant Gold, the closest person he has ever had to a friend. Gold, who he now knows not only can't see what's happening... but won't.

In that moment, Silver is furious; he feels deceived and betrayed by the closest person he has to a friend, who doesn't even know what he's doing; and he's still reeling from losing his 156th partner, a modest, sleepy Typlosion, who has disappeared for reasons he hasn't had time to process let alone try to understand. And here is Kyuubey, offering him a single wish in exchange for taking him some place far away to fight for it.

Ever since he became aware of them, Silver has been determined to escape from the resets. Kyuubey's offer, just by itself, grants that wish; if he accepts, he will be able to escape the waste of Gold's endlessly-repeating year. So, in this moment of anger and disgust, Silver doesn't really think twice about what he wants.

If Gold disappears, the resets would stop. He'll be gone, forever, and no one will ever know the difference. He doesn't stop to think about what might happen in a world without Gold, whose subconscious desires for stability keep things even remotely functional; in that moment, he frankly doesn't care. He just wants Gold, the source of his misery, to no longer exist.

It's not so surprising, really, that someone who's been stuck for so long has such an inherently selfish, destructive wish.

Passive ability: Because Silver's wish evoked sight he's been granted supernaturally good eyesight. His vision is now more than perfect: even at a distance, he can see things with great clarity and detail. His night vision will also be significantly improved, although not as powerful as it is during the day. There is no turning this ability on or off. As a side effect, he will be unusually sensitive to the light; especially sunny days and high-powered lights will be uncomfortable experiences without sunglasses, while flashbangs/magic that features flashes of bright light will easily disable him.

Active ability: Silver’s active ability is to make things disappear within a small radius (within arm’s length) around him. When he makes something disappear, it doesn’t go away into a hammerspace or reappear somewhere else—it is just flat out gone. Things that disappear lose their color and flicker, like a bad signal on a television, before they disappear with a pop of static. This magic was born from the very literal nature of his wish: he wanted Gold to disappear from existence.

To begin with, Silver will only be able to make small-to-medium sized objects disappear; baseballs and doors are okay, cars are not. He will require to be physically touching the object and a brief moment of concentration to make it it disappear. The larger the object, the more time and magic it takes to disappear. With time, practice, and enough magic—(ICly speaking, he practices with it; OOCly, it gets upgraded)—this ability can be developed to be more specific and work with line-of-sight.

Weapon: Longbow. When drawn, its string and arrows are made up of a static-like magic. A weapon that's most efficiently used from a distance, taking advantage of his enhanced sight.

Sample: Genos & Yuuya on the Test Drive meme!