Eames (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ms_eames) wrote,@ 2011-10-15 23:06:00 |
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THE PLAYER
NAME: Tracy
AGE: 33
AIM: SayNoToZombies
E-MAIL: scriblix@gmail.com
TIMEZONE: GMT
THE CHARACTER
NAME: Danielle Eames, although she prefers Eames or, if you must, Dani.
SERIES/FANDOM: Inception
SPECIES: Human
AGE: 34
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Anything goes
JOB: Artist, hopefully ending up owning her own art shop.
DEVIATION FROM CANON: Eames was born a girl.
CANON PUNCTURING PREFERENCE: Yes
OBJECT FROM HOME: Totem - Poker Chip with a series of distinctive markings on it, only known to Eames
PERSONALITY: Eames has quite a strong personality, which you might find surprising for someone who spends a lot of time pretending to be other people, but there you go. She is, to be brutally honest, a cheeky bitch. Charming and likable (at times), sure, but that just means she's a charming, sometimes-likable cheeky bitch. She's selfish, she lies, she steals and she cons people into believing she's someone she isn't. Her self-preservation instincts are high, and she's more than willing to quit a job half-way through if she thinks it'll end badly, and screw the payment - having money is a wonderful thing, but it means nothing if you're dead, or worse. She can be talked round into continuing if the other person is persuasive enough, though.
Supremely confident in her skills, she enjoys her work and all that it entails. She is capable of reading people like books, picking up on all manner of subtle cues and hints to enable her to work out team dynamics at a glance, make more-than-educated guesses at what's never said out loud and identify who's sleeping with whom, amongst other things. She enjoys talking to everyone and anyone who'll reply. It is rare for her to give away anything private about herself during all the chatting, however, even as she carefully studies whoever she's talking with. It helps her to create various different personas when she has to work in disguise. She doesn't always disguise herself as someone the Mark knows; sometimes she'll use a creation all of her own. She has a number of very attractive men in her collection of people, as well as various different women. Each one has their own personality and idiosyncrasies, and Eames is capable of switching between them at a moment's notice.
For all her sarcasm, her sense of humour is often child-like in its simplicity. She enjoys teasing and poking fun at her team-mates, especially Arthur (it's not her fault if the man is almost entirely humourless, is it?) but once it's time to get to work, she takes her job very seriously. She is extremely hardworking and produces excellent, detailed work. Naturally, she will still find time to annoy Arthur; it's almost second nature to her now.
She does have some good points. Her dedication to her job, for one thing. She didn't get to be the best Forger by simply sitting on her arse all day and talking a good talk. She's also very loyal to those that she believes deserve it. Mainly, this means Yusuf, Ariadne (for all that she's new to the team, she's seen the hours the girl put in during the Fischer job and the obvious concern she had over everyone's wellbeing, and that wins her a lot of points) and most of all, Arthur. All the teasing and general dicking around she does is an attempt to cover up the fact that Eames is incredibly attracted to the man.
HISTORY: Dani Eames grew up in London, the only child of a far-too-busy British diplomat and a mother who liked to lunch. As such, it meant that she learnt from an early age how best to work a room, who to talk to and how to make friends with everyone. Boarding school was nothing like her idea of a girl's school. The films and books made it seem like an adventure waiting to happen. Alas, it was horrific and dull, perhaps even horrifically dull, not to mention boring. Even the inevitable bitching became monotonous after second year. It didn't help that she was the annoying one in the class who never seemed to do any work, and still came home at the holidays with almost perfect marks in their exams. Still, she made a small fortune creating fake IDs from old passports and she amused herself and a few others with impressions of their teachers and other students. It passed the time, after all.
Once she left school, she went to university and studied psychology. Student grants were, quite frankly, rubbish, and her parents earned more than enough money to make her ineligible for student loans. She needed some way of earning cash, so she decided to paint and then sell her own artwork. She'd always been good at art in school, after all. Her ability to create accurate replicas was just as useful here as it had been in school, and she soon found herself copying different artists: Dali, Degas, Picasso, Bacon, all sorts. She graduated with a first, and a healthy bank balance.
A brief fling with a croupier while working on her thesis where she researched gambling addictions introduced her to casinos in general; she'd always been good at poker, having been taught when she was a young girl by one of the staff back home, and her years at boarding school had only helped her hone her skills, but she was nothing compared to the really good poker players she got to observe. The amount of money they took home if they won was a bloody good incentive for her to become an even-better player, and so she did. She also learnt how to cheat, and she became incredibly good at that as well.
At the same time, she continued with her art career and her skills at making false IDs had long since surpassed fake drivers licenses created just so as the new owner could buy three litres of cider or beer for whatever party was happening that weekend, and managed to live quite well on her earnings for almost five years. Forging documents soon became her main job, and then came the day she was offered the job that introduced her to dreamshare. She had to make a couple of different identities for each member of a "dreamshare team", whatever that was. Passports, driver's licenses, whatever was needed. One set to get into Slovakia without suspicion and one to get back out. She wanted to know what they were doing, and was clever enough to trick it out of the "Architect", who was a rather slimy sort called Nash. She demanded a go on the PASIV as part of her payment.
While she was under, she started changing things about her appearance without even thinking about it. Her hair would cycle through all sorts of shades, her eyes would shift colour to match the decor of the various dream "shops" she was being taken into, she continually adapted to fit the dream. When the extractor for the team noticed this, she was asked if she wanted to be trained to be a forger in dreams. She jumped at the chance and found that her existing skill-set was practically perfect, plus she was charming enough and ruthless enough to fit into the dreamshare community perfectly. She worked on a number of jobs as Forger, building up a reputation amongst dream-tech circles. She wasn't overly bothered about how legal the jobs were, as long as the pay was good, and she soon became known as one of the best Forgers, if not the best, in the business.
She worked with everyone, multiple times; Dream-tech was still relatively new, after all. The Cobbs were civilians, freelancers who sometimes worked with the military and mostly stayed on the legal side of things, although Mal looked like she could be more than tempted to the dark side at times; she worked as Extractor, while Dom was one of the best Architects Eames had ever worked with. Arthur was one hard bastard and one hell of a Point Man (and oh dear god, his arse was amazing in the suits he liked to wear). Hisako, one hell of an Extractor, and she mourned her dedication to one side of the game as a loss to her own; her Forging skills were more than passable. Sabra, a gorgeous chemist who refused her many and frequent invites to share her bed (and then she saw how she watched Hisako on a couple of jobs, and let it go) and who introduced her to Yusuf after a while. Dani and Yusuf hit it off brilliantly.
She relocated to Mombasa after a while, eager to live the old colonial lifestyle while it was still possible, or at least, that's what she told people. Reality was much duller; she just liked the heat. And Yusuf made the most amazing tea on the planet, which was so good, it was worth putting up with the man's cat for. Plus the sex was rather amazing as well. None of this boyfriend and girlfriend nonsense, mind you. They were friends with excellent benefits.
When Cobb found her in the casino, and invited her to work on the Fischer case, she was hooked almost instantly. The planning all went perfectly, her Forgery of Browning as perfect as usual, Ariadne's different levels all excellent work (and if she was starting to rethink her opinion on who was the best Architect she'd ever worked with, well. That was neither here nor there), Yusuf's compounds were nothing short of chemical brilliance and Arthur's research was almost impeccable, much like the rest of the man. Cobb headed up meetings and did his own experiments, which was fair enough, and Saito bought airlines, paid for everything and checked up on his investments every once in a while.
Of course, Fischer's unforseen militarisation was a bit of a spanner in the works, but they managed to overcome that slight problem, along with Saito's bad luck to catch a bullet in the chest, and when they landed in LAX, Cobb was a free man, Saito was a happy client and the rest of them had incredibly full bank accounts. Eames headed off to get a taxi to her hotel, but she never even made it to the queue. She came round, wondering if she had had some sort of strange reaction to the Somnacin in her bloodstream, and then she saw the note and the PDA.
ABILITIES: Eames is a forger, both in the real world and the dream world. In reality, she is skilled at forging documents and creating counterfeit items such as coins or poker chips, and works of art. An artist in her own right, Eames likes to paint with acrylics or work quickly in charcoal or with pencils. In the dream world, however, she can become anyone at all. She is adept at studying people in order to discover their body language, way of speaking, etc. In short, she quickly learns all she needs in order to become the person she is impersonating. She is a skilled pick-pocket and thief. She is an excellent shot, and capable of using many different types of weapon.
WEAKNESSES: She is a gambler, preferring card games and especially poker to everything else, and while she's really quite good at it, it's still an addiction and her bad days result in spectacular losses. She is often overconfident and far too cocky about her abilities, although she is quick to admit that she's not good at maths. She's also very allergic to cats.
WRITING SAMPLE: She stood in front of the mirror and ignored the sounds of Arthur and Cobb training Ariadne to avoid projections in their own inimitable styles. She'd come down into Arthur's dream hotel so that she could take over one of the bedroom suites to work on her Forgery of Browning, and despite appearances (and any scurrilous rumours to the contrary) she took her work extremely seriously.
She had perfected the physical change a long while ago, but then again, that was always the easiest part of any Forgery. She had an accent to perfect, nervous tells and tiny physical habits to develop, she had a personality to take over and inhabit. Thinking back to her time in Australia, Eames let her eyes shut as she ran through all manner of incidents with Browning. His habit of gesturing towards things with his glasses. The way he confronted things head-on, scaring the utter shit out of grown men with just a few words. The way he was determined that his company would survive the death of Maurice Fischer. His suits that were beautifully made and tailored just right, and still didn't disguise the fact that the man looked like a thug. Eames switched gender and then allowed himself to bulk up and gain a few inches in height. His slacks and striped shirt faded into one of Browning's more sombre suits, and when he reached into the jacket pocket and pulled out the pair of glasses, he was well on his way to becoming the older man.
Eames began talking quietly with his eyes still shut, still running through all that he had learnt in Sydney, and switched to Browning's distinctive twang as he let his voice drop in pitch. "Welcome to the litigation team, Ms. Jacobs, and thank you for joining us at such short notice," he said, repeating the start of the short speech he'd been given when "Ms. Jacobs" replaced a Ms. Kowalski who had sadly been laid low with a rather horrendous bout of food poisoning, thanks to one of Yusuf's nastier little concoctions. From there, he went on to go through his usual voice exercises, and within ten minutes, he had Peter Browning's accent down pat.
He spent another hour or two working on his Forgery, eventually reaching the point where he thought it was passable. He'd let Cobb and Arthur know in their briefing later on in the day, and if they were good boys, he might even let them see, but now? Now it was time for him to go and "help" with training Ariadne. Peter Browning melted away, leaving Eames standing there as herself for a few seconds, and then it was Arthur standing there and scowling at himself in the mirror. Eames had been working with him on and off for long enough now that she didn't even need to check to know that the Forgery was perfect. Straightening his jacket, he checked the safety on his weapon and then went out into the main body of the hotel. Time to shoot projections and corrupt young minds! Excellent!
PB: Tricia Helfer
JOURNAL:
ms_eamesWAS THIS CHARACTER HELD FOR YOU?: Yes
ANYTHING ELSE?: