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[whatarewestealing]

Player Info

Name: Kristi
Age: Over 18
Contact: rageblackouts@plurk
Characters Already in Teleios: Rogue ikindalikeit, Clara Oswald staysput, Alex Millar unlaces
Reserve:

Character Basics:

Character Name: Parker
Journal: whatarewestealing
Age: mid twenties
Fandom: Leverage
Canon Point: S3 Ep 5 ‘The Double Blind’
Debt:

Class A: Total of Class A crimes here: 5 years
Class B: Total of Class B crimes here 5,242 years (it’s a lot of stealing and fraud)
Class C: Total of Class C crimes here 11 years 6 months

List crimes you’ve created for your character here.

Looking better than the bride at her wedding
Being gleeful at causing others pain (multiple instances)
Drugging other people without their knowledge
Knowingly and willingly ruining someone’s career/life/reputation (multiple instances)

GRAND TOTAL: 5,258 years and six months

Canon Character Section:

History:

Wiki!

Personality:

Some people are easy to figure out; what you see is what you get and that sort of thing. Parker is not one of those people. She is an experiment in nature vs…well nature. There wasn’t a lot of nurture in Parker’s life, and what there was wouldn’t have made Good Parents magazine.

Our first introduction in canon to Parker’s past is a scene of verbally abusive foster parents denying her something she wants (a stuffed bunny). The next ‘scene’ is of her walking away from the house with bunny in hand and the house blowing up behind her. This is an excellent introduction to Parker. It shows two things: she will get what she wants so getting between her and it is pointless. She’ll go to any means necessary to get it. She had very little (if any) empathy so she’s detached from violence. While she is capable of killing people, she isn’t a cold blooded killer. She views being able to cause pain as a tool, a weakness to be exposed and used as needed. She is a little wacky in her glee at causing others pain, but doesn’t view it as something they ought to take personal. She’s simply trying to pick a lock, crack a safe, solve a puzzle, and people are pretty cool puzzles to solve. They’re all different. We see small instances of her love of tiny violences in several other episodes. She likes to taser people. A lot. She pokes at Eliot’s existing bruises to irritate him, to make him crack because Eliot doesn’t crack. It’s innate in Parker to want to crack things and break them down into pieces she can understand and control.

Parker was cycled through the foster system and obviously spent some time in a county orphanage. This has damaged Parker’s self worth as a person and possibly went a long way toward making her the thief that she is. Because of her skills, she has worth. Her mentor, Archie Leach, further enforces this. He trained her to be the perfect thief and, we can imagine, instilled the idea that as thief, because of her skills, Parker has worth. With the exception of her thievery, Parker doesn’t recognize herself as extraordinary at all, which backs up the idea that her self worth is tied to her thief skills. In S2 she draws a sketch of ‘the guy’ apparently very well and Hardison is all ‘I didn’t know you could do that’ and she says ‘I thought everyone could do that’. It’s not a thief skill, so why would she think she’s extraordinary at it? She knows she is broken. She knows that there is something wrong with her. This is seen in a couple of episodes and expressed by Parker, but she also knows that she is the best thief in the world. That’s where she gets her confidence from. It’s also where her insecurity around other people lives. This idea of being broken was only enforced by Archie who didn’t let her into his ‘real’ family (wife and kids). He kept her separate from them because he knew she wouldn’t fit in, and let’s admit it, it probably makes her a better thief being on the edge her whole life.

With help from Sophie, short term and given the right character (someone who’s weird and a little ‘off’) Parker can fake being a normal person. Her favorite ‘normal’ person alias is Alice White. Alice is an alias created and maintained by Hardison but coached by Sophie. People end up actually liking Alice. She is someone that Parker is actually successful portraying and therefore becomes comfortable using as her ‘normal person’ disguise. For all of this insecurity, Parker is comfortable with who she is. Again, this probably come from her success as a thief rather than any social success. She would never want to be entirely normal, but she does want to be normal enough to ‘pass’ in a social situation. She doesn’t want to be popular and she doesn’t need a great deal of friends. Chances are that would only freak and stress her out even more. In fact, as far as friends go, Parker is quite content with the crew she’s got.

Part of this is because Parker is a very solitary person. She likes being alone. She likes being able to have her routine and do things her way. For example, when we see Parker’s residence, it’s as odd as Parker is. It’s a larger ware house, meticulously organized and there is a shelf full of nothing but cereal. Bringing another person into her space, being truly social would mean disrupting her routine, buying something at the store other than cereal and I don’t think Parker is really willing to do that. More than that I’m not sure Parker can do that. She needs that structure in her life in order to feel safe and keep herself on track.

Social interactions with Parker don’t always go well. She’s not entirely aware of or able to execute acceptable social behavior. She has issues with personal space. She can be seen invading people’s personal space at random. She does things like gets too close to speak to someone, pets people when she likes them (Maggie, Nate’s ex-wife is the best example of this) and speaks too loudly. She doesn’t have much of a filter on her mouth, saying whatever is on her mind. She is brutally honest not out of some moral code, but because she doesn’t realize (or understand) that it’s rude to tell someone they look fat in that dress or that they’re stupid. Throughout the series, with coaching from Sophie and help from Hardison she does gets better at social interaction, but Parker is never going to be voted Miss Popularity. She just doesn’t get it. Some of her more notable social disasters include stabbing two different men with forks. One incident was caused because the man she was flirting (awkwardly) with put his hand on her knee. The other was because the man told her to smile, something that we see via flashbacks she was told a great deal as a child sometimes during very traumatic situations.

For all her social awkwardness, if Parker decides she likes you or if she understands your situation, she can be surprisingly comforting. She is protective. She is as brutally honest about telling someone they’ve got nothing to worry about when it’s true as she is about telling them the truth about an airplane accident.

That brings us to Parker’s emotions, starting with empathy. According to the creators of the show, Parker doesn’t really have that emotion. This comes across in various interactions with people. In fact, emotions (and expressing them) are difficult for Parker in general. We see this most notably in her relationship with Hardison. It’s clear in S3 that she likes Hardison and the entire world has known Hardison has a thing for her for ages, but she doesn’t know how to proceed with that emotion. She expresses a desire for pretzels as a stand in for her desire to have a closer relationship to Hardison. It’s also obvious when she likes someone. Again, I’m going to refer to her liking Maggie. She pets her and tells her that she’s adorable. We rarely even see Parker really angry, which suggests that it’s an emotion she has trouble getting in touch with and expressing as well.

Often, in the show, Parker appears to be oblivious. Sometimes this is the case, but sometimes it’s a cover-up for freaking out and it’s also a survival skill. Freaking out in Parker’s world can get a person caught, or killed, but acting oblivious to the danger (or any other situation that freaks her out) helps her stay calm and therefore, helps her survive.

Parker is always thinking, always considering the next job or how she’d get out of this scenario, how she’d break into that building. During one con she appears to come up with a way to break into the business on the fly. When questioned about it, she responds ‘Some people do crossword’. This puts into perspective how routine and rout planning this sort of thing is to Parker’s brain.

Let’s talk about Parker’s thievery. She’s the best there is. Period. There are people with more experience (such as her mentor, Archie) but no one is better. While the other members of the Leverage team have been caught or arrested, Parker has never been caught. She is, quite simply, extraordinary. This is what Parker was born for and it’s evident watching her. Parker steals things simply for the thrill and the love of stealing them. During the break they all took after S1, Parker stole the Hope diamond.

And then put it back.

It wasn’t about owning the diamond. It was about being able to steal it, about proving to herself that she could. She says n episode one that she likes money, not things. Money is security to Parker. Money means that she can get up and leave with just her bunny and her money in tow. That’s also one reason that Parker keeps her personal belongings (and her friends) light. As a thief, she needs to be able to pick up and leave immediately.

Which kind of works into Parker’s trust issues. It’s probably no surprise that Parker doesn’t trust easily. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. She can’t trust people because of what she does ‘for a living’ and Parker isn’t good enough to keep up a lie the way Sophie (arguably) can. Because of her childhood, Parker hasn’t had any reason to trust people. Past evidence has shown that people can’t be trusted and, unfortunately, in her line of business that’s only likely to be reinforced. It’s arguable how much she trusts even her team. She is shown catnapping in Hardison’s van on occasion, which sort of implies trust as that leaves her very vulnerable. On the other hand, we see Parker trust the team with her life on numerous occasions, but trusting someone with your life and allowing them to see you vulnerable are two very different things.

As for her team, whether she trusts them entirely or not, they are incredibly important to her because they accept her the way she is. Some of them even appear to like her that way. They’ve gotten to a point where they rarely question her eccentricities and they’ve proven that they won’t leave her behind. All of these things are things that Parker hasn’t necessarily gotten anywhere else in her entire life. Archie gave her that acceptance , but as a mentor it was a different sort of relationship than she has with the crew. You can see how she values them because she allows them to teach her things that are out of her comfort zone (like social skills & fighting) and because she hangs out with them when they’re not working a job. I mentioned how much Parker likes her solitude so for her to seek out the companionship of another human being is a big deal.

Teleios will be a bit of a struggle for Parker, especially at first. She is being jerked out of her comfort zone and thrown into something that is entirely unfamiliar to her. She will have to start all over attempting to establish a structure and a routine. She’s going to have to find some place to sleep because Parker does not sleep in the vicinity of other people unless she is very comfortable with them. She won’t have any of her climbing gear so she can’t engage in her favorite hobby. Once she actually settles in though and gets her structure and her routine in place, it might actually be good for her. She’ll be forced to socialize and the idea that she can redeem herself and become a better person will slowly begin to appeal to her.

Powers/Abilities:

• Lock picking
• Security Circumvention
• Intrusion specialist
• Pickpocket
• Excellent upper body strength
• Some hand-to-hand combat
• Possible photographic memory and ability to sketch those images
• High Speed Driving-(Which has some cause for concern as the others, especially Sophie have commented on it).
• Car thief
• Wheelman/Getaway Driver


Appearance:

Parker

CR AU

Game You’re Transferring CR from: NA

How has your character changed from their canon self?

Are they gaining any abilities from their time in game? Did the game setting take something from them?

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

[Parker is sitting on a fence near the stables, her spine rigid, heels of her hands pressed into the wood, head bowed, eyes squinting as she focuses on the medium sized animal currently nibbling at the toe of her shoe. She leans down a little further, closer to the goat. ]

It doesn’t taste good.

[ The goat continues blissfully nibbling at the toe of Parker’s tennis shoe. After a moment, she lets go of the fence with one hand, reaches down and puts her hand on the goat’s head, intending to push it away. Quite abruptly, the expression on her face changes to one of awe. The goat is much softer than she imagined it would be. The goat turns it’s head and gently, toothlessly nibbles at Parker’s fingers. Her forehead scrunches up, brows coming together, lips pursing as if she’s trying to decide if this deserves a reprimand or not. After another moment, giggles start to bubble out of her and she gracefully, bonelessly slides from the top of the fence to her feet and then sinks into the grass, her back against the fence. The goat begins to snuffle and nibble at her hair, her face and her clothes. Parker, all the while is alternating between stern-facing the goat and giggling. ]

You’re still smelly.

Prose Sample:

http://whatarewestealing.dreamwidth.org/573.html#comments