PERSONALITY
What you have to understand about Ruby is that she grew up in a world where every adult she encountered would have preferred her dead. She probably should have, after all, like so many in her age group - but Ruby was part of the lucky 2% that survived IAAN. Well, if you understand that "lucky" means you have freak abilities and lose all control over your life, then yeah, sure, she's lucky. Growing up in an environment like Camp Thurmond, which was effectively an internment camp for 3,000 kids like her, Ruby learned fast and early that the world was an ugly, dangerous place, and even the people on your side can't protect you. Like anyone in a dangerous, prolonged situation, Ruby adapted: in Thurmond, you listened to the PSFs (Psi Special Forces) or you were punished. You did as the PSFs told you or you were punished. You slept, ate, breathed, shit, spoke when the PSFs told you, or you were punished. Ruby went into Thurmond when she was ten, and she spent six years obeying their rules to the letter - partially because she didn't have a choice, and partially because she was terrified of being found out to be one of the dangerous ones. No one really knew for sure what happened to the Reds and the Oranges and the Yellows when they were taken out of Thurmond, but Ruby could only assume the worst until Clancy confirmed it. The Oranges might just be the most dangerous, and that's why the government killed as many as they could, quickly and quietly while the rest of the country was distracted by a tanking economy.
Being an Orange means accepting being apart. In the League, people avoided eye contact and didn't keep her company when they didn't have to because they were afraid of her. She used it to her advantage there, because she didn't want to connect with anyone. But the truth is, Ruby is afraid of being exactly what they all think she is. Clancy was exceptionally manipulative and cruel, he made her care for him - literally, with his abilities - and pretended to love her, all to get information from her. Martin was about as creepy as it gets, and every Orange she saw using their powers in Thurmond was just further proof of what she could be, if she wasn't careful. Clancy joked, when they first met, that he never thought he'd meet another Orange who wasn't a psychopath, but Ruby remains the only decent-hearted one we see in the series. It makes her hyper aware of what she could be, and that thought alone is enough to make her toe the line.
A lot of what Ruby does is out of fear, but beneath that is real compassion. She's a bleeding heart, "overly empathetic" and unwilling, for the most part, to do anything that would mean hurting others, at least not intentionally. She's done a lot of hurting unintentionally, including making her parents forget they had a daughter; she did the same to her best friend at Thurmond. She couldn't always control her powers, and the guilt and loneliness of those acts led her to fear herself and what she can do: touch wasn't allowed in Thurmond, but even after Ruby would shy away from it, too afraid of slipping into the mind of anyone she came in contact with. And after erasing herself from Sam's memories, Ruby didn't speak for eight months. She knew, then, that no matter how well she lied or how careful she was, she couldn't hide what she was.
Ruby has been convinced she was a monster pretty much from the start. Her powers manifested on her tenth birthday: that's when she wiped her parents' memories, and that's when she was spirited away by PSFs and taken to Thurmond. As her busload of kids with hands duct taped behind their backs disembarked, she witnessed her first Orange willfully using his powers: he got off the bus behind her, turned to the nearest PSF, and calmly told her to shoot herself in the head. He grinned while she did it. Ruby saw, and when the chaos was conquered and it was time to sort her, she accidentally used her abilities again to convince the doctor that she was Green instead of Orange, already deeply aware of how terrible it was to be one of the Dangerous ones. The next few years just proved her right: before the Oranges were all removed, Ruby watched them torture the PSFs with images of dead loved ones or phobias, stubbornly refusing to be cowed. They were braved, but they were repugnant, too. Ruby still thinks that there is something wrong with them, with her. It's affected her capacity to control her ability: she's spent so many years wishing it away that she struggled to actually want to use it. She doesn't want to be a monster.
But she's willing to be, if it means protecting the people she loves.
It's why, despite the fear that hounds her day and night, despite the knowledge that no one over the age of twenty can be trusted and not even most people under can be relied on, she keeps winding up in shitty situations. She has a terrible tendency to be decently-moralled and kind-hearted in a world that's broke and cruel and more likely to turn her in for a reward rather than help her. In Thurmond, she was helpless, and the guilt of that - of not helping Sam when she was brave enough to protect Ruby - has never left her. In camp, she was a mouse, a ghost: she may as well not have existed after Sam forgot her. In many ways, Ruby didn't want to. But once she got out, that guilt went into overdrive mode, and soon it was fueling her: she may have been helpless in Thurmond, she may have been helpless to do anything for Sam, but she never wants to let people down again. It's almost surprising how swiftly she goes from the terrified prisoner broken out of Thurmond to the girl determined to protect the Black Betty crew. She only knows Liam, Chubs, and Zu for a day or two before deciding that the only way to pay them back for saving her from the Children's League is to keep them safe, at any cost. This includes her secret: she tells them she's a Green, and manages to keep it a secret for a few weeks. But when they are caught by a bounty hunter, Ruby sacrifices the truth in order to save them, certain they will see her as the monster she's always been convinced she was.
Despite her best intentions with the League, despite her determination to keep herself at a distance from her team of kids, Ruby is almost incapable of not caring about people. She convinces herself that she needs no one, that she can get by on her own and protect the people she's already bonded with, but Jude and Vida still managed to worm in, leaving her guilty over all the things she never bothered to learn about them. In canon, after her pull point, Ruby even manages to forgive Clancy - who she really does hate, he's a dick - because she comes to understand him. And then she just feels sorry for him (and hates him, he's still a dick).
She also takes responsibility extremely seriously: when she joins the Children's League, it's with every intention to bail on them. She doesn't trust them at all and uses them as a tool - but even so, she does her job extremely well. Part of this is because being an effective operative means being privy to more information, but there are times when she seems to buy into the language: she is her team's leader, and when you're Leader, you're responsible for your team. She never questions that, not once, because it's something that she didn't need the League to explain to her. When there are people relying on you, you do whatever you can to help them. When Jude gets activated too early and gets assigned to the mission that Ruby plans to escape on, she initially is frustrated by the diversion: he would be one more mouth to feed, one more back to watch when all she wants to do is find Liam, the person she's really worried about. But she can't leave him behind, because he was only activated so that the agents on their team could kill him. Ruby knows this, and she's responsible for (and, despite herself, cares about) Jude. She has to look out for him. It's part of why the guilt of losing him later almost destroys her.
Grief is hard for Ruby. It's hard for anyone, obviously, but she doesn't handle it well. She disconnects and holds it at bay, or she's swallowed by it: Jude died in the collapse of League's HQ, while they all were trying to get to the surface. He was claustrophobic, and knowing how he died - alone in the dark and the silence, the things he hated most in the world - left Ruby with her own temporary claustrophobia. It will pass, but for a while she will struggling with this. This is par for the course on how she deals with a lot of terrible things: when Clancy mentally assaults her, she runs into the forest to get away from everyone, even throws away her shirt because it smells like him. She needs to separate herself from sensory stimuli; at a later point in canon, to escape some terrible news, she runs on a treadmill until her feet literally start to bleed. The only way she knows how to deal with the absolute worst the world has to offer is by retreating until she can wrap her brain around the facts and control her emotions.
Though she would be the last to say it let alone see it, Ruby is extremely brave. She may not seem so on the surface - with the Children's League, in Alban's presence, she hates how her voice always goes small around him, like she is just a kid and not a glorified child soldier for his cause - but since leaving Thurmond - since seeing the open sky full of stars, with no fences in sight - she has not failed to expend every effort on doing what needs to be done. Whether that means giving up her secret to save her friends, or joining the Children's League to save Chubs' life, or wiping herself from Liam's memory to protect him, Ruby always finds the strength to do what she needs to. Between protecting herself and protecting the people who need her, she will choose others every time. Every time.
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IAAN
It started as Everhart's Disease, named for the first child to die of it. Michael Everhart was just like every other kid born into Generation Freak: normal, except for an inherited genetic change that left him and 98% of America's youth dead. Eventually, they came up with a more clinical name - Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, or IAAN. People will forget Michael Everhart, but there's no forgetting IAAN. Every kid who managed to survive didn't come out unscathed: there are the Greens, with their genius intellect; the Blues, with their telekinesis; the Yellows, with their electrokinesis; the Oranges, with their mind control; and the Reds, with their pyrokinesis.
They're the ones who survived. They're the ones the government built camps to contain. They're the dangerous ones.
APPEARANCE
Ruby has brown hair and green eyes: she's the rather cliche kind of female protagonist who doesn't realize she's as pretty as she is. But given that she spent puberty in a holding camp that had no shortages of bullies or creeps in the form of guards, it's not that surprising.
ABILITIES
Ruby is an Orange, and she, like all the other Oranges and the Reds, is one of the dangerous ones. Ruby pushed away her ability for years, terrified of what she could do - and rightly so. The first time her ability emerged, on her tenth birthday, she wiped the memory of herself from her parents' minds. After she did the same to her best friend in Thurmond, she didn't speak for nearly a year.
The thing about Oranges is that they all seem to function a little differently: Clancy seems able to tell a person a thing is so, and a thing is so; Martin pushes feelings into other people, makes them feel something strongly enough to gain the effect he wants. Ruby's ability lies largely in images. To influence someone else, she has to push the picture of them doing what she wants into their mind. She often describes it as a pair of hands in her brain, fingers constantly trying to unfurl, to grasp at whoever is nearest. For six years, the only control she exerted - or tried to exert - was to keep those hands fettered tight. She was constantly afraid of losing her tenuous grasp and outting herself, but eventually she did learn real control.
For a long time, she couldn't use her ability without direct contact, which was a great frustration; at this point, she can flex her brain and influence those out of physical reach. She can force images of what she wants someone to do into their mind, and they will do it. She's finally in control of herself, more or less: she doesn't know the extent of her powers, or the limits. She knows that when she's stressed, or experiencing strong feelings, she is less able to hold back, and more likely to get a hell of a head ache in exchange for resisting. She doesn't know how far she can go - not morally, though sometimes that's it's own concern, but physically or, well, psychically. She isn't in a rush to find out, though: Ruby is already dreaming of the day when all the insanity is over, and she never has to use her power again.
What she doesn't know yet is that her abilities, and those of her entire generation, are due to political bullshit. There were threats of terrorism against the United States, so the president in charge before she was born okayed a water treatment plan that would counter act the possibility of biological warfare. The chemicals that were used were tested - but these things can have lasting effects that can't be examined in a short period of time. It took a generation or two, but it resulted in Generation Freak: they have these specific powers based, possibly, on what they were doing, what part of their brain they were engaging at the point of manifestation.
As far as weaknesses go - there's something back home that they call White Noise (officially called Calm Control by Psi Forces), which is essentially some frequency that only Psi kids can hear. It's like a dog whistle, except it isn't just a summoning device: it's like jackhammers in her head combined with dentistry equipment, combined with screeching car alarms and any number of other unbearable noises. It's meant to disable Psi kids, and it works. Certain frequencies are worse, and can be adjusted based on color: the usual frequencies will result in dizziness, nausea, complete disorder. But the frequencies that only the Oranges and Reds can hear - Ruby has only hear it once, but it resulted in a heavy nose bleed and passing out. The upside: she's heard it so often over the past six years that she can, if her life and those of the people she cares about is on the line, power through the regular White Noise.
BARGE REACTIONS
Ruby is not going to take well to the Barge.
She's coming from a world where there are essentially bounty hunters out hunting children - basically, anyone under 20. When they're caught, they're thrown into camps, which are their own special brand of hell. Some are better than others, but none are good. None are fair. They call them camps, but in reality it's just prison for freak kids. Ruby was in Thurmond for six years; she knows what it's like to be a prisoner, and she's going to struggle just to walk out in the open here. It was one thing among the League, but the Barge is entirely new, and it's going to be especially difficult to accept that IAAN just doesn't exist in most other realities. That particular unfairness is going to be really, really hard to swallow.
Floods and breaches especially will be a struggle: she's had her mind fucked with before, and badly, and it left a mark. She's going to get very jumpy about having someone in charge fuck with her head - or allow it to happen - here, and it will be her sense of duty and guilt, her knowledge that she owes the people back home that keeps her on board, before she develops deep relationships.
Running into fictional characters is going to be rough, too, but Ruby at least isn't tactless: she'll be disbelieving first, definitely, but eventually she'll push past it. She might even use it to her advantage, in a bad situation - Ruby has gotten good at using what tools she has available against people. Even if it sort of horrifies her.
The worst will be those floods that turn her into someone more like Clancy. Ruby spent six years terrified of what she could do, and she's still afraid of crossing the line. She's come close, she thinks she crossed it already, and that is unbearable for someone whose one real fantasy is that one day she won't ever have to use her abilities again.
As a warden, Ruby will struggle - partially because she's been on the other side, and partially because she has no idea how to actively sit down and help a person. She's done it before, don't get me wrong, but Ruby is better at doing things that come naturally rather than thinking too hard about them. She'll probably be her own stumbling block for a while, but eventually she'll figure it out and stop being a robot.
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BASICS
NAME: Ruby Daly
CANON: The Darkest Minds
CANON POINT: Changeable!
AGE: 16/17
STATUS: Devoted to liberating Generation Freak but also making intense heart eyes at Liam Stewart, probably forever.
OCCUPATION: Terrorist???
RESIDENCE: Dreaming of Black Betty tbh
PERMISSIONS
BACKTAGGING: YEEESSSSS
4TH-WALLING: NOOOOO
THREADJACKING: Yes!
MIND READING: Yes! Good luck though, she can do it right back.
FIGHTING: Yes yes yes yes
ROMANCE: Bring it
INJURY: Yaaas
KILLING: Nah, not unless we hash it out first.
OOC
NAME: Ari
JOURNAL: zenith
PLURK: ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico) with_discipline
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zenith