Voidtreckers Application

[namethattune]

Player Information

Name: Kia
Age: 32
Contact details: kiaxet or Kiaxet#7085 on Discord
Other characters: N/A

Character Information

Name: Dr. Siebren de Kuiper/Sigma
Canon: Overwatch
Canon Point: After the recall
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: 62

World Information:
From the wiki: "Overwatch takes place on a near-future Earth, some time in the mid 2070s. Some thirty years before, robots turned against humanity in what became known as the Omnic Crisis. This eventually led to the formation of an elite strike team, who finally brought an end to the war. This team was the beginning of Overwatch, an international task force which tried to maintain global stability for two decades, until corruption tore it apart. Though Overwatch was disbanded, new crises are looming, and the world still needs heroes."

Relevant details that the wiki summary didn't include: After the resolution of the Omnic Crisis, one of the main antagonists to Overwatch was the terrorist organization Talon, which believes in strength through power and is not averse to burning the world down to manufacture an "only the strong survive" scenario. While not initially responsible for Overwatch's corruption issues, Talon's actions served to worsen them, and Talon eventually recruited several of Overwatch's former agents after the fall of the organization.

Personal History: Wiki link!

Personality:
Dr. Siebren de Kuiper is a brilliant astrophysicist and an inquisitive, thoughtful, detail-oriented person; he's also a massively traumatized human being held together by sheer stubbornness and unhealthy coping mechanisms.

His usual demeanor is that of the scientist, and likely his normal personality before the accident. He's incredibly driven - one does not become the best in their field without being driven - with a very analytical mindset. He's quite fond of the quotation, "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you,"; he is also the type of person to seek an understanding of the universe himself. It led him to his studies on gravity, and he came to see it as something of a unifying theory - a harness for the mechanisms of the universe.

That said, Siebren is also quite the social person and generally seems to be fond of people. He's been known to read other scientists' research, regardless of whether it aligns with his specialization, and delights in discussing it with them. While he is absolutely capable of being competitive and even petty when it comes to his work, a lack of direct and specific competition leaves a lot of space for compassion, and he is generally supportive of and enthusiastic for others' work. He's the sort of person who would be a delight at a casual chat over coffee and hell on wheels at trivia night. It's when he's hard at work or socializing that he seems to be the most at peace with the melody in his head, and he can occasionally be found conducting it or absentmindedly humming along.

But one does not survive one's body and psyche being ripped apart by a spontaneous black hole without some...changes.

The accident that gave him his gravity powers also put the melody into his head. Whether he truly is hearing the universe, or whether it is simply a symptom of sanity stretched past its breaking point, is unknown and functionally irrelevant; what matters is how he handles it.

Not terribly well on his bad days, as it turns out.

Being hospitalized and isolated as a danger to others as well as oneself - being locked away with a designation instead of a name - takes quite a toll. When he was rescued stolen removed from psychiatric lockdown by Talon, he spent a good amount of time getting his newfound powers and his mind under control, which meant developing his own coping mechanisms. Given that the terrorist organization with the literal mad scientist on their payroll (no, not Siebren - Moira) likely did not believe in things such as therapy, said coping mechanisms are not terribly healthy.

On difficult days - when he's under duress, when things are not going according to plan, when the melody is dissonant and too loud - Siebren tends to disconnect from reality. The more minor occurrences - spacing out, missing a few conversational beats, asking if anyone else can hear that music - tend to be brief and easily explained away. Higher-pressure circumstances can push him into anxiety and panic, though Siebren has become adept at self-correcting in order to avoid spiraling. It takes focus and control, and he already had one and developed the other as a matter of necessity. Given that his control over his mind tends to correlate with his control over his powers...well. Best that he avoids a full-blown panic attack.

Fieldwork - missions - require a different method of coping. Talon does not break a superpowered human out of a holding facility without expecting to get some use out of them, and Siebren is occasionally sent on missions. He refuses to go by name on missions - like most of the rest of Talon's operatives, he functions under a code name in the field: Sigma, the same designation given to him while he was in psychiatric lockdown. It's not a dissociated identity so much as it is a different mindset; there is a mission at hand, which will likely involve combat and require extensive use of his powers, and so it is time to be Sigma instead of Siebren. The added stress of missions, in which the situation can go awry at any time, and the necessary psychological division between Sigma and Siebren tend to push Sigma further towards destabilization. He can focus quite well, especially since missions are led by someone else and he doesn't need to deeply consider his actions so much as accomplish them, but the melody is terribly loud during Talon fieldwork and can often lead to explosive use of his powers. Sigma is a necessity; Siebren is not truly aware of who he's working for, or why, and keeping that knowledge at arm's length is the only way he can continue to balance on the thin line of his sanity and function as well as he does.

All in all, Siebren's outwardly friendly demeanor belies an incredibly broken man who never had the help he required to truly heal and is in far, far too deep to upset the precarious balance of his current mental situation. But really, he's fine. Now, does anybody else hear that music...?

Key themes:
Control. Science is all about control: isolating and testing one variable and controlling all other aspects of the experiment. Sigma's initial approach to gravity was viewing it as a harness for all things; harness the harness and gain control of the universe itself. After the accident - after everything went out of control, with horrifying consequences - it's been all about personal control: gaining control of his powers and, when things are particularly bad, control of his own mind (see the desperate, repeated mantra of "hold it together hold it together hold it together").

Main Motivation:
Science. Siebren's drive to continue his work has not diminished in any capacity; in fact, there are some days when it's the only thing that allows him to focus and remain in control.

Skills:
Siebren has gravity powers! Essentially, within a certain radius centered on him, gravity is essentially at Siebren's whim. He tends not to abuse his powers - partially because he's still not entirely comfortable with the fact that he has them in the first place, and partially because that's just rude. He tends to only use them on smaller objects - floating and manipulating them - or on himself, though he could use them on other people with an act of will - say, to catch someone as they fell. Given that his powers are connected to his trauma, the greater the use of his powers, the less stable he becomes - another reason he tends to stick to inanimate objects.

Of course, that rule gets bent on missions, especially combat-heavy ones. Given that Sigma is a character in a team-based FPS game with a very specific role to fill - in his case, shield tank - information on his powers tends to be very mechanically specific and lore light. His specific techniques that are unlikely to occur outside of a fieldwork/combat scenario are:

• Hyperspheres: A small pair of gravitic charges - spheres about the size of a squash ball, with about as much impact potential - that Sigma can launch from his hand. They can ricochet off of flat surfaces, and will implode after traveling a certain distance away from him, returning to his hand.


• Experimental Barrier: A hard-light barrier, generated from wrist-mounted tech but held in place by gravity powers, that functions as a portable shield. Sigma can move it at will; however, it's only so durable, and will disappear and need to recharge after taking a certain amount of damage.


• Accretion: Sigma gathers local debris into a small boulder and hurls it at the enemy. Stuns the enemy on impact, because that's generally what happens when one is hit with an impromptu flying boulder.


• Kinetic Grasp: Sigma creates a small localized black hole that absorbs projectiles, functionally negating ranged enemy attacks within a small radius for a short amount of time.


• Gravitic Flux: This is the big one. Within a certain radius, Sigma can select enemies, hurl them into the air en masse, leave them hanging for a few seconds to make them very easy targets to anyone with a clear shot, and then slam them back on the ground faster than the speed of gravity, to devastating effect. This doesn't grab inanimate objects or allies within the selected radius; only hostiles.

In skills less geared towards gravity powers and breaking enemies, Sigma is also a brilliant astrophysicist, equal parts natural intelligence and hard work. He's a problem solver and a dogged pursuer of answers, which means he's going to have an absolute field day trying to figure out how the train works and which version of multiverse theory is the practically applicable one.

Item:
A wrist-mounted bracer that enables him to use his experimental barrier (detailed above).

Sample: From the TDM

Notes: /slaps hood of extremely sparse lore provided by Blizzard
this baby can fit so much headcanon