(no subject)

ISLAND CHAPTAL
SPOTLESS

IN CHARACTER

NAME. Island Chaptal
ALIAS(ES). Island November [wherever], Island Halder [US], Island Kovius [ZA], she never changes her first name but technically all these last names are valid
AGE. 27

CANON. Spotless book series
CANON POINT OR AU. Post-Apache Strike Force by about six months (the time between book 4.5 and book 5), generally

Personality

If she were to define herself in one word, Island would pick "nerd."

And it's a very valid descriptor, though others might prefer "geek" - but she's not a gamer (for more than mobile games), so she's decided to stick pretty firmly with nerd. She loves science and math and using experimental models and diagrams to solve life's everyday problems, like trying to make friends and date in her 20s as well as what to do with wi-fi enabled guinea pigs created by an overseas colleague.

Her favorite things are the books most people would call 'popcorn' novels, reading and memorizing Wikipedia, beaches, the occasional first-class flight to a far off location, mysteries to solve (real and fictional), and people. For a socially awkward nerd, she's remarkably extroverted. The social awkwardness isn't entirely her fault; she didn't really have a lot of people she had contact with more than twice until well into her teen years. But she makes up for that awkwardness with a genuine curious enthusiasm for just about everything. A child of the Internet almost exclusively, as it was her only school and only friend for a very long time, Island (born in 1989) really jives with cat videos and memes and considered LiveJournal the best thing about her teen years.

Island is smart. She is creepy, crazy smart, as described canonically. Her skills and intelligence are so easily underestimated, it's only a guy who Island is pretty sure is her enemy who actually notices she's good enough at learning, collecting information, translating and problem solving that the CIA should be trying to keep her on their roster (though after what they put her through, she wouldn't accept). Because how could someone who wears pajamas in public be that competent? Even Island is unaware of her capacities, and downplays just about everything she manages to do, because self esteem isn't her strong point. Which doesn't mean agency isn't: she doesn't let anyone, even the army of badass mercenary men she keeps ending up traveling with, walk on her or make decisions for her. Except if she's being incapacitated by her own brain - after a major head injury and two brain surgeries and an attempt at supervillain-induced amnesia, Island gets felled by migraines and sometimes can't remember things. That's the vulnerability she can't hide; the self-esteem is an after effect.

But her biggest true weakness is all tied into that -- it's not the tendency toward thinking she's not good enough, though there is that. It's the tendency to wanting bordering on needing to be included, wrapped up in curiosity, that leads to Island's refusing to ever stay behind somewhere safe. She usually comes up with a plan, but occasionally just bursts into a situation without thinking, and her mouth tends to run a about a minute ahead of her brain. To say this gets her into trouble sometimes is an understatement.

Her desperate fear of losing people, her need to keep those she loves close emotionally if not physically -- that's something she doesn't talk about either. But Island is intensely loyal (if not to a fault) and loves hard enough to hurt herself. While she loves knowledge for its own sake, she's most strongly motivated by her people, and it's the loss of those people that keeps her awake at night. She's an optimist, and tries to hope that everything will always work out, that people will always come back, that things will fall into line -- but at the same time, fears of the opposite keep her up at night.

HISTORY

CANON HISTORY.

THIS SPOILS ALL THE PLOT TWISTS IN THE ENTIRE SERIES, but RP is going to do that.

So this is Island Chaptal, born September 20, 1989 actually in Oxford, but she's never lived there before. Like most people, she has parents -- unlike most people, she technically has three of them. Until she was twenty-five, Island believed that her mother, Léa Chaptal, was a French diplomat. Her father, Simon Halder, was a two-time fling in London and her parents were never "together," so to speak. They were always close, though, and she spent two weeks a year in New York City with Simon. The rest of her life was spent constantly moving around, never living anywhere longer than six months, alongside her mother; Lea gave free-range parenting a broad definition. Until she was fifteen and a half, Island never attended school. But she did have a computer of her own by age four, which explains a lot about Island.

At fifteen and a half, Island and her mother were in the car on a small roadway in Japan when suddenly Léa lost control of the car and crashed into a propane tank at a gas station. Her mother was killed instantly and Island was seriously injured, left with lasting brain damage (which manifests as profound, intense migraine attacks) and took six months to recover. Eventually she regained most of her strength, and did the final three years of American high school at the Spence School in New York before graduating and attending Columbia University for undergraduate and masters degrees in software engineering. She and her best friend Joy, a lawyer, got a place on West 81st. Island got a great job at EM Tech, "the Stark Industries of reality."

Or all that's what Island thought.

The parts that are true: Léa Chaptal was definitely her mother. Simon Halder raised her and loved her and was the man her mother chose to be there for her, so he has always been her father. The car crash was real, and everything after it authentic, from the first moments of her hospital stay to her second graduation from Columbia and beyond.

The parts that aren't: Simon wasn't her biological father. Léa wasn't a diplomat, either; she was a very highly regarded thief who worked on commission. She stole a famous, valuable (ugly) diamond called the Ghost Cullinan for an organization called the Board, and then double-crossed them to turn it over to the Lions, run by Commander Anies Kovius and his younger brother, Vice-Commander Dries, both Léa's lovers (Dries the one she actually loved, Anies the one who insisted 'brothers share') ... and then she realized they wer both crazy megalomaniacs and triple crossed them, disappearing into the wind with the diamond and Island.

She learned about the rest of that about a month after turning twenty-five, when obsessive-compulsive hitman (and former Lion and closest disciple of Dries) March broke into her apartment and organized her tax returns while trying to track down the diamond. From there, it's the whirlwind we call "canon": March kidnaps Island, certain she knows where the diamond is. Island didn't know anything about a diamond. Or any of the truth about her mother. Simon didn't know about the diamond either, but pointed them toward Léa's attorney ... long story short, they found the diamond, Island's inheritance, Dries (who tried to kill them and then apologized later) and a bunch of other excitement. The Ghost Cullinan went back to the Board and its Queen, an older Iranian woman named Guita who developed a fondness for Island.

March and Island also kind of fell in love -- and Island eventually learned he rescued her from the car way back when one of Anies' henchmen shot her mother for stealing the diamond, but it's a little more complicated than that, too -- but between concerns about potential Stockholm syndrome and commitment issues and March being a contract killer and repeating all the failures of their previous generation in Léa and Dries, let's be nice and just say they broke up rather than highlight exactly what March did.

Fast forward six months: Island's boss just jumped out a window, but she's convinced he was murdered. March has opened Struthio Security in New York in an attempt to go legit and re-enter Island's life, but she has a boyfriend, Alex, who is lying about being CIA. Turns out he's been using her to get to a supercomputer banking program called Ruby, or maybe it's just because Dries killed his parents ...

Adventure ensues. Trams are destroyed. Island manages to get rid of Alex (probably). She and March are all set up for their happy ending, until Dries makes a heel-face turn against Anies on the other side of the world, and they're considered collateral damage in the attempt to erase Dries and his followers from the map. Escaping from a helicopter in a falling-apart Jeep is just the beginning, as they meet up with Dries' other closest acolytes Dominik and Isiporho, Dries himself and an old friend not actually named Dikkenek (who knew Anies, Dries and Léa when they were young). Anies has set Dries up to look responsible for some terrorist attacks, and the ragtag group of misfits are going to clear his name ... along with help from Dries himself, the CIA, Roomba cats and not Alex, who is attempting to foil them at every step. This comes to a head in Rangiroa, where -- let's say a lot happened at once.

Let's say that for a while, it ended badly.

There was even a moment of space travel.

And Island wasn't sure if she was actually Simon's daughter, Dries' or Anies' after he did some experimental brain surgery on her already damaged cerebrum ...

... but now Anies is gone, the Lions are in better hands, and March and Island are back in New York trying to make a life that's a little less weird, chaotic and surreal.

It won't work. It never does. But after Ecuador, everything else is just another Tuesday.

ABILITIES & POWERS

Island has no supernatural abilities or powers except for being the [warning for TV Tropes] Weirdness Magnet (though with her family background it's not that unusual), but she is an absurd polymath, and her areas of exceptional knowledge is littered around her canon, including:

She has two degrees in software engineering (BS & MS) but has some intuitive gifts with hardware as well. Considering the PhD. Programming and network "security," aka white hat hacking, is more intuitive to her than human interaction and she's not that bad with people either.

She speaks eight languages fluently (English, French, German, Afrikaans, Japanese, Finnish, Italian and Spanish) and can read Old Phoenician but whether or not she's pronouncing things correctly is a tough call with a "dead" language. She still has a fast language-learning brain.

Collects random trivia like breathing.

NAME. Kit TZ. US EST PB. Susan Coffey CONTACT. skeletone
AVAILABILITY. daytime weekdays mostly