walkietalkie | + application (lifeaftr)

Player Information

Name: trace
Age: 25
Contact:

watchtower
Current characters: nada

Character Information

Name: clementine
Series: the walking dead game

Appearance:

Age: 12, approximately (11 in canon + time in haven)

Canon Point: season 2 endgame + her latest stint in haven

Transferring From: haven (

havenrpg), may it rest in peace

Canon History: right here!

Canon Personality:

Clementine was only eight when the apocalypse hit. When the devastating virus ravaged the country, maybe even the globe - not that she really thought too much about the world outside the Georgian borders. It's been nearly three years since then, and she's spent almost a quarter of her life so far in a world with little electricity and running water, with no schools or stores or playgrounds, in which any given night could end in something that once was human chewing on what's left of your dead body. It's the kind of world that changes you, in a big way. In a lot of ways, she's the same girl Lee found hiding in her treehouse that day years ago, but in so many ways, that girl's dead just like the walkers.

☑ who she was before

For the sake of not having a mile-long application, you can see who she was in Season 1 lined out neatly right here for your skimming pleasure.

☑ fast-forward three years

It's been two years and change since the day she shot Lee in the head, and Clementine is barely an echo of the innocent girl she used to be. From the first that you see her, she's quieter, more beaten down. It's clear that it's been quite a long time since she's been happy, since she's had a good reason to smile. Maybe not since Lee died. That's one of the first things you see her say after the time-skip, after asking Christa if they were even going to make it to their destination town up north, is that she misses Lee. She still carries his picture in her backpack, despite keeping very few personal belongings otherwise, and later on, when Luke asks about how she survived, she talks about Lee and how he saved her a bunch of times and how he's why she keeps her hair short, and you can just hear it in her voice, how much she still loves Lee like a dad. She repeats advice Lee gave her on multiple occasions, between telling Sam the dog that they're smarter than walkers and telling Sarah to hold her breath a little when she shoots.

It's also clear that she never did attach to Christa like she did to Lee. She's been with Christa at least three times as long as she was with Lee at this point, and they're still little more than travel-buddies, even a little tense. I get the distinct feeling she shut herself off after Lee died (you see her a lot more reserved even in the earlier prologue scene, when she's still just 9), and even moreso after Christa loses Omid. I'm not sure what happened to Christa's baby, either, but I feel like that probably put some tension between them too. Still, I get the feeling that she has a harder time letting herself attach to people anymore. She knows that everyone's going to die, she knows that, and she tries to keep herself at a little bit of a distance so it doesn't hurt so bad when that happens. This is in sharp contrast with Season 1, where she threw her heart and guts into Lee.

☑ hardcore survivor

By now, Clementine is an expert survivor. She's used to being cold, being wet, being hungry, being dirty. She's used to surviving. She's used to digging through the rotting trash to maybe find the Holy Grail: a single sealed can of still-good beans. She's also a lot more comfortable with walkers now. She knows their limits and she knows hers. She has no problem looking at them, examining them, getting close to them if they're dead or just pinned and can't quite reach her. That's a huge contrast with the end of Season 1, in which the walker was stuck in a chair and she still could barely approach him for fear of getting grabbed.

The Clem you see in Season 2 is infinitely more resourceful than she ever was in the first season. You see her take out walkers with no less than seven different inanimate objects (mostly gardening tools), and her go-to for quite a while is a simple hammer. She also manages to stitch her own arm-gash shut, improvising with fishing line instead of thread. She mentions 'just like last time', implying that this isn't at all the first time she's had to do this (though it would've been to Christa last time).

Where a few years ago her morals were pretty black-and-white, that went all to shit sometime between Omid getting shot in the bathroom and the scuffle she has with what seems to be a bandit in early Episode 1. When she was younger, there were things you just Don't Do. Now, you do what it takes. Anything it takes. She bit the guy's thumb clean off just for grabbing her and refusing to let go, and when he kept attacking, she shoved him off her and into the hands of a walker. This is something she'd never have done years ago, is hand a guy off to a walker. That's one of the worst deaths she can imagine, after all. She is also more than willing to shoot you if she has to, or to threaten to with a handgun steadily trained on your forehead. This is no longer the little girl learning to shoot. This is a girl who can and will take you the fuck out.

☑ fewer reservations

Despite being quieter and more beaten down overall, she's actually a lot less reserved in a number of ways. She talks to herself now, much like Lee did in the first season. I feel like it comes down to 'the curse of being a game protagonist', but it's still valid characterization. Things like, "You're gonna be fine, you're gonna be fine," to herself when she's locked in the shed, or even talking to objects, like the "Please don't be bad..." when she cuts open the can of beans. Instead of silently hoping for or reassuring herself of these things, she often does it aloud, anymore. I think that has a lot to do with how long she's spent alone or just with Christa. She's learned to keep herself company, y'know? That doesn't mean she doesn't get lonely, but sometimes it helps to hear a human voice, even if it's your own.

She has also grown into a sort of self-confidence despite everything. She is no longer afraid to voice her opinions, even to complain. Even little stuff, like when she opens the cooler of bad food and immediately recoils with a miserable disgusted noise and plaintively says (to nobody in particular), "I am so sick of that smell." Or when they lock her in the shed and she looks around and disgustedly says, "I can't believe this." Or when she stitches her arm, she first sucks in a breath and says, "This is gonna suck." This is not just true for negative sentiments, though. When she finds a can of beans, she lets out a quiet but emphatic, "Ohhhh my god, thank you."

She's also grown out of the role of the 'protectee', or the kid who needs supervision. Even as young as 12, she's now the one willing to do the adopting - to take the lead in a scenario. In fact, it comes naturally to her. She's with Sam the Dog for not much more than five minutes before she starts referring to the two of them as 'we'. "We won't go another night without food, okay?" In a confident has-her-shit-together voice she never could've managed years ago. Even in the brief talk with Christa in the beginning, she didn't just wait for Christa to tell her what they should do. She put her own two cents in, on how they could better survive. On top of that, she's lost much of her sense of fear in matters of protecting those she cares about. In later episodes, after seeing Carver shove a man off the roof for poor-quality yardwork, she shows no hesitation in speaking up and taking the blame for mistakes she didn't make, just to take the potentially-dangerous heat off of the people she cares for.

☑ both more and less sentimental

In a lot of ways, she's not as sentimental as she once was - walkers no longer phase her, and when she finds a picture of a family at a campsite a stray dog (Sam) leads her to, she says, "Looks like they were a happy family once... Let's hope they left some food behind somewhere." Less than a second to mourn the people who clearly left this life behind, then she's thinking of how their deaths can benefit her. It's not that she's a cold person, not at all, there's just a point sometime into the apocalypse where you have to stop letting strangers' deaths get to you. Still though, when she later has to bash in the skull of the guy in the picture, she looks at him and says, "Poor guy." Legitimate sympathy. Later, in the beginning of Episode 2, Pete (one of the few in the group she really trusts by then) is bitten and her first question isn't sympathy or asking how he feels, it's a low-voiced and practical, "What are you going to do?" Clementine's also a lot less people-oriented nowadays. A couple of years ago, she'd have jumped at the chance not to be alone (because note that this happens after she loses track of Christa), but she sees the tents and says, "I wonder if anyone's been sleeping here... Better not stick around and find out." She'd rather be completely alone than meet strangers and risk whatever dangers they'd present. I get the feeling strangers have done her and Christa wrong quite a few times in the past, even discounting the one who shot Omid.

Still, underneath the part of her that sees safety in being alone, in not being sentimental about people, there's a part of her that needs to connect. She's in the middle of searching that campsite for food when she spots a frisbee, and she instantly picks it up and calls to Sam, the dog. "Do you want to play fetch, boy?!" They throw the frisbee a couple of times, with him fetching like a pro, before she says, "I bet you missed this. I sure do..." She tries to close off that part of her, but it's still there. She still misses fun, misses playing, misses connecting, misses sharing joy with another person. That connection is cut short a couple of seconds later, when she throws the frisbee a little too far, Sam gives up on it, and she says, "Yeah, you're right - shouldn't waste the energy, anyway." Right back to practical.

That above, though, is also an example of something else her nine-year-old self never really did. In Season 2, Clementine is extremely prone to falling into sadness and regrets. It makes sense, what with everything good in her life having already been destroyed but for the simple fact that she's still alive, but it's a heartbreaking change to witness from the little girl in Season 1 who always found a reason to smile. When talking to Sam about the pinned walker, his former owner, she says, "He had a bite, see? Looks like he tried to cut it out..." And then her face falls and her voice goes a little bitter. "But that never works. Ever." Thinking of Lee, of course. Later, when Luke (in reference to the scar the dog bite's going to leave on her arm) says scars are better than stumps, Clementine kind of loses herself in thought. He asks about it, she says she just had a friend who lost an arm once, is all. That's another thing she's more reserved on, anymore - talking about the people she's loved and lost. It wasn't so hard when life was still okay - she could talk to Lee about her parents, for example, in Season 1 - but nowadays, it just drags her back into that hole of misery she's constantly battling not to fall into. When Luke asks, though, she does tell him about Lee. She paints Lee as a hero, as the best man she ever knew, and as someone who died because of her. See the aforementioned sadness and regrets.

By the time Episode 4 rolled around, though, she'd reverted at least a little bit back to the group mindset rather than the loner one. She's got Serious Loyalty to Luke (her new partner-in-crime, kind of) and she also really cares about Kenny and feels responsible for Sarah and all kinds of other emotional ties she didn't have just an episode and a half ago. This has really shifted her mindset to focus on the group. Like, near the end of the episode, Carver practically bashes Kenny's face in and the group is talking about how it's possible that they'd have to consider leaving Kenny behind when they escape, but Clem puts her foot down in a firm 'no'. At the start of the season, she would'e considered it. Okay, maybe not with Kenny specifically (with their history and whatnot) but in general, leaving someone behind used to be a valid survival technique. She'd hardened herself, and now that hard shell is falling away a little. Too bad Episode 5 killed off pretty much everyone the game ever let her care about. Now it's just Kenny and the infant left.

But on that note - She told Sarah something really interesting, when Sarah was smarting from Carver making her dad hit her. Clem said that you can 'turn off' the pain. She said it's hard and that you really have to practice at it, but that it's possible. Sarah didn't want to practice, and Clem said that nobody does. I feel like this is a key revelation in how she copes as well as she does. She turns off the physical and the emotional pain alike, or tries to. She's had a lot of time to practice, that's for sure.

☑ shady morals

It's not just in crisis situations in which her morals have gone grey a little. "I'd like to think they'd want to help us, if they were still alive," she says as she loots pockets, after refusing to touch the stuff in the car in season 1 because it didn't belong to them. She also ends up killing a dog (after it attacks her, of course), which gets her lectured by Luke: "You don't kill dogs," he insists, as if that's still a taboo. In that sense, Clementine's adapted to this new world faster than a lot of grown-ups. She also has no problem straight-up stealing if the situation calls for it. Luke and his group found her after she nearly passed out from hunger and bloodloss from the dog bite, and they insisted on locking her in the shed to wait it out and make sure the bite wasn't a walker bite. So she breaks out of the shed and sneaks up to the house, working Alvin over for some bandages and then straight-up sneaking into the house itself to get the doctor's sheltered daughter Sarah to help her get the rest of the supplies to patch up her arm so it doesn't get infected. Stealing, essentially. When they call her on it later, she tells them they left her no choice. Even later, after patching her up more properly, Carlos says he wishes she hadn't done what she did. She says, "I was hurt and you weren't helping." Not apologetic in the slightest. She did what she had to do.

However, while her morals took a nose-dive, her keen ability to navigate social situations has only multiplied (despite the lack of people to practice on)... And now, she uses it for a lesser sort of evil. Two years have gone by, and this new Clementine is actually pretty manipulative. As the new malleable protag, Clementine has a number of dialogue options in each scenario, but I noticed that at least a few of them are just different shades of manipulation. For example, when she shows up at Alvin's window after breaking out of the shed, she tries to get him to help her - to sneak her medical supplies. "I can tell that you're nice," she says. "I know you wanted to help me." My particular malleable Clementine tends to go that route of manipulation because it seems the most IC to me - like the lesser evil. In that particular scenario, her options are that (compliments), grabbing for sympathy (a teary-eyed "It's okay... I've just got nobody else to help me."), and what almost sounds like a threat ("Would you really let a little girl die?"). She knows the time and place for threats but it's not how she handles things like this, and throwing a pity-party is kind of below her level of dignity, I feel like. She also carefully told Sarah that she could die if she doesn't take care of her arm, proving she isn't just a one-trick pony here - she knows exactly which tactic to use and on who. Between that 'I could die' statement and a pinky-promise that they'd be friends, Sarah was more than eager to help. Clementine was only saying they were friends to get the help, but even she would feel bad breaking a pinky-swear to a girl like Sarah, so it looks like she pinky-swore herself into a corner on that one.

Another example of this manipulation comes up later, when Rebecca (who she'd just overheard worrying her unborn child isn't her husband's) is being awful to her so she bites right back. "Don't talk to me like that," she says, followed by, "You should watch your language if you're going to be a mom." Rebecca won't let up, so Clem gets all faux-innocent and asks, "Whose baby is it?" It's a subtle threat, an 'I know something you don't want to leak', and the sort of blackmail a lot of kids wouldn't think to use. However, of the two options Clementine can say as a follow-up, instead of saying, "You should be nicer to me," and completing the blackmail, she simply says, "I won't tell." And she won't, because being a blackmailing bitch isn't how she handles this whole apocalypse thing - she really just wanted to give Rebecca a shock, to knock her off her high horse a little to make things more tolerable. In a sense, she also wanted to prove herself to Rebecca - to get the power in her own court but let Rebecca know that despite being treated like shit, Clem isn't going to rat her out. The next day, she tells Pete (about Rebecca): "She's all talk. She doesn't scare me."

☑ a little darker, a little more angry

It makes sense that she's a little rough around the edges nowadays, and with her newfound confidence, she also has grown into a much more teenage anger. A good example of this is how exasperated she is with Luke and his group when, after she calmly and rationally explained about the dog bite and offered to leave as soon as it was patched up, they still locked her in the shed. "It was a dog," she says in a low voice as Luke leads her to the shed. "You'll see." (The other two dialogue options are saying her arm hurts - that is, another pity-party - and asking him to help her escape, which is also more desperate than she'd sink to quite yet.) Later, after she steals the supplies and stitches her arm, a walker gets into the shed. She barely manages to take it out without it getting her. Needless to say, the group comes running out to open the doors and see what the commotion's about. They look at the walker and ask if she's okay. Clementine, meanwhile, is So Done With This Shit. Gritting her teeth, she says, "I'm still. Not. Bitten! I never was, and you left me out here to die." She's seething by then. They invite her inside, and when Luke asks if she's hungry on the way out of the shed, he gets the cold shoulder hardcore, not even a glance in his direction.

A lesser example is detailed in the section about stealing the supplies - how Carlos says he wishes she wouldn't have done that, but she isn't even 1% apologetic, saying they gave her no other choice. Carlos continues on that he's mad that she manipulated his daughter into stealing from them, explains that Sarah's different and says Clem would do best to stay away from her. In Episode 2 (as in, with further time to bond), she'd take the "I didn't know... I'm sorry." dialogue option, but as it stands in that moment, she puts on a level tone for, "You don't have to threaten me." She's a little too hardened and a little too proud to apologize when he's delivering a threat.

On top of that, she's clearly become unconcerned with the various things she's supposedly too young to do. She swears without a lick of hesitation, and she even asks Pete for a cigarette when he finds a pack. He doesn't let her, but if you (as a player) choose to follow Nick instead of Pete, Nick offers her whiskey and she tries that, too. I chose Pete so she's still whiskey-free, but the point stands.

That's not the worst of it by far, though. Near the end of the season, when they finally turned the tides on Carver, Luke had a gun trained on Carver. Clementine was the one who said to just shoot him. Luke balked, said that Carver's a piece of shit but you don't just shoot someone like that. Kenny then stepped forward, shooting out Carver's knee caps and saying that's pretty much exactly what you do. Kenny was going to brutalize Carver the way Carver brutalized Kenny for no reason whatsoever, and nobody dared get in the way of his vendetta. But when Kenny told Clem to go with the others and not to watch, she said she was staying. Luke said she didn't want to see this, and Clem said, "Yes I do." She's got a sort of darkness inside her, a vicious cruelty only softened by the fact that it's only turned on the people who seriously hurt her and the ones she loves, but it's still there. She wanted the satisfaction of watching Carver die, after what he did.

The above point is interesting because Carver strongly insisted to her that she's "like him", and that she realizes it and it scares her so she refuses to believe it. He insisted that unlike the rest of her group save for maybe Kenny, she's prepared for this world and everything it's going to throw at her. He said she knows what needs to be done, she knows how weakness needs to be handled so it doesn't get them killed, etc, and that fundamentally, they believed the same things. She spat that she's nothing like him, but the comparison still stands. This girl's teetering on an edge and could go down a really treacherous path if pushed the wrong way.

☑ still harbors a hope that people are innately good

Though she clashed with a few of them early on, the new group she found more-or-less brought her back to life. She sank to an all-time low before she found them, but they pulled her back to the light, so to speak. They took her in, fed her, talked to her, welcomed her for the most part... She was a little careful around them, sure, but she knew people make mistakes and wouldn't hold any of it against them. When Nick apologizes early on for almost shooting her, saying they had a bad experience in the past, she says everyone's had bad experiences, but that she gets it. She forgives him. She's also honest with Luke from the very start. He took her in and did everything he could to help her, so throughout the season she does everything she can for him right back. She tells him the truth, she respects him, etc. etc. As a general rule, good people get good Clementine. She wouldn't steal from them now, not since they really started to care about her. She only did in the first place because the situation was dire and they were kind of treating her like shit.

She also uses social engineering powers for good, once she's with this group she cares about. Rather than manipulating people, she starts to use it to keep the peace, to slide in when people start arguing and calm the situation down, and she's actually pretty damn good at it - even better than in Season 1, when she did the same thing.

There's also a part of her that oftentimes can't leave someone to suffer, even if they've tried to hurt her in the past. While she has no reservations feeding people to walkers or even shooting them herself in a crisis, when the dog who bit her winds up impaled and suffering, she can't just leave it there - she has to put it down so it doesn't suffer. She can't help but cry over that, despite how fiercely he attacked her just for offering him a little food. And later, she trips over a guy who was in the group that harassed Christa right before they got separated, except now he's dying on a sand bar in the middle of the river. He asks for water, and she has the compassion to give it to him.

Personality Shifts:

Clementine spent about six months in Haven the first time, months 2-8 if I remember right, and while she went back and essentially canon-updated two years since then, she still remembered a lot of the things she learned the first time around. For one, she knew that despite being a mess of horror and mayhem, Haven was still better than back in Georgia. She's not so used to having a town full of living people to talk to anymore, but once she came back and remembered her last time in Haven, it kind of fall back into place. She also learned a lot about forging new families and being strong in her own right the first time she was there, but those lessons were re-learned in canon after her last-time canonpoint, so there's that.

Most of her important CR had disappeared in the time she was gone - she'd been gone an awfully long time - but I'll list them anyway. She had Wade, who was making a solid effort to be her new "partner" (grown-up guardian/teammate, she calls it 'partners') when Lee showed up. She didn't yet know Lee's eventual fate (a later canonpoint, for example, would've had her sticking with Deadpool), so she went off to live with him, but Wade always had this special part of her heart - not to mention the other end of her walkie-talkie. Red Medic was also pretty important to her, and right up until the day he disappeared, he always looked out for her. She kept the stuffed toy he gave her right up until the day she disappeared too. When she came back, Wade had kept it for her the whole time she was gone. Just in case, y'know? Jack Frost fell into the 'big brother' role early on, though he never quite seemed to know what to do with the occasional morbid turns of conversation. And there's no forgetting good old Uncle Glitch, whose memory was bad enough that Clem had to volunteer to remember stuff for him. He got possessed by a demon and tried to kill her, but she knew it wasn't really him so she wouldn't let anyone hunt him down, because that's what family does: it protects each other.

Haven had changed quite a bit, the second time around. The old housing had been destroyed, the faceless enemies were no longer quite so faceless, and everything seemed both more serious and closer to within their control. She formed new bonds and friendships with the others in her room, especially Jesse Pinkman and Mao, and of course she continued to stick close to Wade (who, thank god, was still there). She made a proactive effort to keep them safe - like fortifying their apartment block, since each one was about the size of a house and much more easily defensible than the former apartment building.

She endured a lot of Serious Shit, that second time. There was an in-game AU where everyone got mindfucked into a sort of Haven Suburbia, and before she and the rest of the PCs realized what was going on, suburban Clem asked her suburban adoptive dad Wade Wilson if she could actually call him 'dad' sometimes. It was a really big Shit Just Got Real moment right before people started getting lobotomized and shit... actually did get real. Then there was this labyrinth where everyone who died was supposedly permanently dead, but in actuality, they were awake and seeing/hearing everything but entirely unable to move - so after refusing to kill any of her friends to get out of the labyrinth the easy way, she had the not-really-pleasure of getting "murdered" and watching Wade go absolutely batfuck insane on her killer.

So of course, by the time she disappeared from Haven a second time (AKA when I dropped), she'd set up a failsafe to talk to Wade in her absence - one that she knew he'd find. It basically said that if she disappeared like that, not to be too upset that she was gone, because she'd come back to him twice already and was going to do so again. Because he was family, and family doesn't leave other family behind. Not forever, anyway. No way.

Abilities:

She is a normal human in every way, physically, save for the fact that upon dying, her corpse will probably reanimate due to the way the Walking Dead zombie virus works. However, she's lived (on her own and with others) in an apocalyptic world for almost two and a half years now, so if there's one thing she can do extraordinarily well, it's survive. She can hunt and gather for food, she can scavenge the remains of what was once inhabited (a campsite, a house, anything) and know what exactly to gather, she knows how to makeshift gear from various junk and lesser supplies... And she also knows how to deal with people. She can shoot a gun like no eleven-year-old has any right to be able to do, but she's as good as negotiations as she is with threats. She also has pretty good physical endurance and whatnot, after traveling and living off the land for so long. Plus, she knows the basics for stuff like field medicine (telling the new group she finds that her arm "needs to be cleaned and stitched and bandaged" in no uncertain terms, then proceeding to do so with stolen supplies and fishing line).

Inventory:

glock 17 handgun, empty ( will petition the gods for bullets later or something )
a hand-axe
a single walkie-talkie, covered in stickers ( y'all's deadpool has the matching walkie, so this reunion's gonna be cute as fuck )
pink backpack containing torn picture of lee, drawn picture of kenny and his family, handcuffs with bloody scrap of white sleeve caught in them

Sample

Thread Sample: her test drive starter for what that's worth, plus a supplementary thread from haven (albeit one that's outside of the year time-span) to show an actual thread, in case my tdm starter still has no tags by the time the app's reviewed. if that's not kosher, i'm down with a Q&A

AND OH LOOK, A Q&A:

Do you care about others, or would you rather let them fend for themselves?

matter

killed

says the girl who very recently and of her own volition inherited sole guardianship of a literal infant in the heart of post-apocalyptic winter.

What do you like about yourself?

I can stay alive. When all of this started, most kids... didn't. Not even for a couple of days. But I'm smart, and I learn fast. About walkers, and also about people.

Do people frighten you? If so, why?

before

take

Who is someone you admire greatly, and why?

but that's not really an answer, is it? at least not a direct one. so she tries again, a little more slowly to convey hre main point:

all

What is your most valuable possession?

her walkie-talkie came to mind immediately, but she already feels stupid for it. she knows the right answer to this question:

more

Describe a fond memory you have.

this one takes a second. she doesn't like talking about fond memories. she doesn't like talking about the dead people in most of those memories. she also doesn't like showing vulnerability of any kind, unless she's playing the 'helpless kid' act to save her own ass. but after a second, eyes firmly on the floor off to the side, she starts to explain.

did

before

before the apocalypse. her voice from here onward is one part steely, two parts grudging and resigned.

really

know

her lips quirk the tiniest bit at the corners, reluctantly fond, as she recalls:

her lips press together a second.

a pause, and a little shake of her head.

Are all lives equal, or are some lives more important than others?

supposed

see

lot

have

They