APPLICATIONS | 2012; 01

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Orlando Gardiner | Otherland (reserved)

[scanningutterly]

Player nickname: Orlando
Player DW: paperback
Way to contact you:
Email: agreylady@gmail.com
AIM: Elspeth Vimes
Other: pluuurk
Are you at least 15?: Y.
Current Characters: Masamori Sumimura, Anthy Himemiya, Ayako Matsuzaki, Sayaka Miki

Character: Orlando Gardiner
Fandom: Tad Williams' Otherland
Character Notes:

History:
Orlando is the son of Vivien and Conrad Gardiner, a well-meaning and well-off California couple. In a cruel trick of genetics, Orlando born with progeria, and had major health issues from the start. When he was very young, his parents made sure to give him some normal experiences, visiting the zoo, having relatives over. But as he got older and sicker, this became much harder, and all the Gardiners became pretty cut off from the world. They moved from the city proper to the walled-off, upscale community of Crown Heights, and even Orlando's contact with other sick children he had met at the hospital dwindled away to nothing. Orlando never attended regular school, but went to netschool online. He was greatly respected for his intelligence by teachers and students, but never really had any friends there. While he received regular offers from IT companies willing to pay his way through college in return for a few years of work, he never accepted any such offer, well aware of the fact that the odds of him living long enough to graduate from college were almost nonexistent.


When he was younger, his mother read him fantasy books, and he went on to read more on his own, finding a great deal of meaning and inspiration in them. From reading fantasy and his interest in virtual reality, he got into gaming. In the Middle Country simworld, he spent years as the top-ranked character, Thargor. In the game he teamed up with the thief character Pithlit, and became friends with the player, Sam Fredericks, out of the game. They lived across the country from each other, and so never met offline, but Orlando for years considered Fredericks to be his only real friend. Uncomfortable with the possible implications, he never told Fredericks about his illness until a series of circumstances caused Orlando to find out Fredericks' secret. Namely, that Sam is, in fact, a girl.

One day, while in the Middle Country, Orlando saw the most completely convincing bit of VR he had ever encountered appear as a sort of window in one of the dungeons. Determined to find out what it was, he eventually got to the source, taking Sam along. Once in the Otherland system, he and a number of others who had found and followed up on clues like the one Orlando had seen were directed by the mysterious Mr. Sellers to help undermine the Grail Brotherhood, a group of remarkably powerful people who had created Otherland, from inside their network, hopefully freeing the children who had gone into comas as a result of contact with the network and stopping evil people from ruling the net as well as the real world. Orlando and Sam were split from the group early on, following their own path of investigation that illuminated a number of things and exposed them to some very important people. The entire group met up again in the Troy simulation (where Orlando was Achilles and Sam was Patroclus). Shortly after that, there was a battle to stop the Brotherhood from making the virtual copies of themselves, and Orlando died keeping the others safe.

That wasn't the end, though. The telepath at the heart of the Otherland system had decided to copy Orlando, and he was resurrected like Gandalf in digital form just in time to save his friends from getting killed (afterwards, he promptly collapsed). He helped in the fight to stop the Grail Brotherhood, and eventually remained as a caretaker in the new, telepath-free Otherland network.

If accepted, I would be starting him pre-canon. ...which more or less means you can ignore the last two paragraphs.

Personality:

Orlando is likely to first come across as withdrawn and cynical, by means of his mix of polite distance and sarcastic comments. Those who come to know him better might come to describe him as a person with a mature view of the world but who hasn't entirely stopped being a child.

Orlando is both highly intelligent and very observant, whether he's researching new advances in programming or noting the effects of class inequality. It's not just book smarts either, he's good at thinking on his feet and can find some creative solutions to problems. With very few exceptions, Orlando likes to know about things. He's the kind of guy who will see something odd out of his window and afterwards spend days researching the phenomenon and things related to it. He likes to think he has few illusions about the world, and in some ways he's right. He's prone to cynicism, most often expressed in the form of sarcasm. But in spite of this, he is, at heart, deeply idealistic. He genuinely believes people can and should change things for the better, that humanity in general does have a hope. The world may be a pretty unpleasant place, but he doesn't want it to be like that, and he's sure that most other people feel the same way. Perhaps from all the fantasy, or perhaps because he simply needed something to believe in, Orlando developed something of a romantic streak. He makes note of heroic actions (which can mean either saving the world from evil overlords or helping orphaned kids). And he really wants to be heroic himself.

It's not exactly easy for him to be around people, though. Orlando was strongly influenced both by experiences of people judging (and pitying) him based on his illness, and by a desire to appear strong in spite of his illness. He tends not to trust people to care much beyond surface appearances, and doesn't really open up as a result. It must also be noted that he will often be perfectly content not to find out anything more about a person than is obvious. While he will get a little better about opening up, Orlando's default state when dealing with people is either “polite, intelligent, young man” or “sarcastic geek,” depending on the circumstances. Distance is easier, and stands less of a chance of hurting him. He'd rather make less of an impression than be judged as somehow lacking.

He's stubborn and proud. If he wants to do something, he wants to do it well. He wants to be the best if he can. And he'll keep trying, loosing himself in the pursuit of a goal to the extent that he neglects other (possibly more important) concerns. He likes having accomplishments to define himself by. He'll argue for something he believes in until he falls over (literally). He is also extremely reluctant to admit that his opinion might be the wrong one. It can take him a little too long for him to change his mind. But once he does, he won't make an issue of the matter again.

Orlando has a strong sense of humor. For the most part, it's tilted very heavily towards the sarcastic. But he has a good appreciation for both wit and absurdism. He may tend mostly towards quips and deadpan remarks, but he also loves it when other people give him a chance to just be goofy.

The things he fears most are failure and loss. These have been constantly present or hovering over him all his life, and when they occur they hurt both him and others. He'll fight against them as long as he's able. He tries to get used to the idea when he can't (see: his frequent use of VR "death trips"). He tries to take control and act mature whenever he possibly can (and one or two times when he shouldn't). Since it's rare that he really allows himself connections, absence can hit him hard.

Additional Links:

haha I wish there were proper additional links. Have wiki and t.v. tropes anyway.

First Person (entry type):
[Private, voice]

This whole thing is utterly scanbark. Some retro net community that connects universes? That's impossible. It's some kind of joke, or game. A pretty stupid one. Are there really people who miss that kind of message board thing?

They're not bad, though. I'm going to have to start tracking down where they're from, Beezle's hitting dead ends on his own.

...It's pretty chizz idea. I mean, what if it were true? Middle Earth could be out there somewhere and you could- what's the word- 'worldhop' to it. That'd be amazing. Not that I could go, of course. Pretty sure you can't get patches in Middle Earth.

I wonder who thought it up. They seem to be into old stuff.

Third Person:

He could, Orlando reflected, as the teacher droned on about Reconstruction, probably hack the attendance record and skip this class. Ninety percent of what Mr. Kubayanda said was straight from the assigned readings, Orlando could easily pass the midterms and finals just by skimming the homework. He could hack the attendance record, log out of netschool for a while, and his parents would never know. He could even do something educational in the meantime- there were a few interesting-sounding articles on vr he'd been meaning to read.

But somehow it felt too much like a cheat. Even if Mr. Kubayanda was terminally boring (and Orlando should know about terminal, ha), it was still, well, school. It was something to talk about. And he'd already missed classes earlier this semester, when he'd had that nasty ear infection.

Orlando noted the slight lag time between Kubayanda's words and the mouth movements of his sim. Maybe part of why he was boring was just bad gear.

Maybe skipping the readings would make this class more interesting. It would give Orlando a little more motivation, at least.

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