lukesmith

The Player
Name/nickname: Kathryn
Age: 25
Pronouns: female
Contact: kathrynkr at gmail dot com
Experience: see my application for Peter Vincent.
Currently played characters:

The Character
DW account: lukesmith
Name: Luke Smith
Alias: The Archetype
Age/Birthdate: Luke is a few months old, with an apparent age (and mentality) of thirteen years.
Species: Human
Canon: Sarah Jane Adventures
Canon point: Soon after "The Lost Boy," which takes place in 2008
Played By: Tommy Knight

Icon:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/5264440/1827489

Abilities:
Luke's mind, like the rest of Luke, is an amalgam made from literally thousands of people. As a result, he is hyper-intelligent; he has an eidetic memory and is a phenomenally quick learner. Math and science come to him easily, and he spends a good deal of his time gathering knowledge. All humans in his universe possess some latent telekinetic abilities; thanks to his origins, Luke's such abilities are astronomical (literally, on one occasion). However, he is unable to use those abilities without the aid of devices designed for the purpose, and would likely be very reluctant to use such tools due to having had extremely negative experiences with them.

What he has in brains, Luke lacks in brawn...or most types of athleticism. He's a healthy kid, but he tends to be physically awkward. He's been described by a friend as having "no sense of balance" when skateboarding, and he runs like a dork. On the other hand, Luke demonstrated considerable combat skill in a laser tag game designed to identify possible soldiers. He has a very powerful immune system, too: he has never been sick in his life (though later in his canon, he becomes ill one time in reaction to extremely toxic alien plant spores), and his teeth have never shown even the slightest sign of decay.

Luke does not dream unless he is under the influence of an outside force that causes him to do so.


Appearance:
Though he's only a few months old, Luke looks like a thirteen-year-old child, baby-faced and only starting to reach the gangly stage. He has dark, down-swept shaggy hair, dark eyes, and big eyebrows. He usually wears t-shirts expressing his interests or that he just thinks look interesting. He has no navel.


Personality:
As someone who came into existence fully sapient, rather than growing naturally, Luke initially lacked context for anything and everything he encountered within human culture. He was fortunate enough to be taken in by Sarah Jane Smith, who, along with Luke's schoolmates and fellow adventurers, Maria and Clyde, has taught him how to tell right from wrong. His personal moral and ethical code is still somewhat nebulous; while Luke genuinely wants to do what is right and has started to gain an instinct for it, he is not always aware of the potential consequences or hurtfulness of his actions. He is somewhat easily tricked due to his naivety, and has found the task of learning how to recognize when someone isn't being honest with him more difficult than learning more concrete things like mathematics.

He has a highly analytical personality. While this makes him adept at solving scientific and strategic problems, it also makes him too literal-minded to grasp many of the nuances of human interaction. He has extremely little talent for telling jokes, as his metaphors and double entendres are usually simple and awkward, and he lacks any sort of comedic timing.

Many of the other children Luke's apparent age find him odd, and as a result he tends to get sidelined socially. He gets along well enough with most of the other kids at school, but tends to form only a few close friendships. This is also partly due to the fact that the activities he and his friends get up to his adoptive mother frequently include saving the earth from extraterrestrials, along with various other things best kept secret. Luke doesn't particularly mind not having a very large circle of friends, as the relationships he does form tend to be close, strong bonds.


History:
Luke was created for the purpose of selling soft drinks.

Yes, seriously.

In 2008, several members of a squid-like species known as the Bane invaded the Earth. Their plan was to get the entire human population to drink Bubble Shock!, a fizzy soft drink containing a substance excreted by the Bane (the excretion was called, a bit confusingly, "bane"). However, 2% of the population was immune to the effect of bane, which caused pleasant feelings in most humans, along with making them susceptible to Bane mind control. In order to conduct research into remedying the immunity of the 2%, the Bane created a human boy called "the Archetype," using DNA and brain scans of thousands of visitors on factory tours to create a single amalgam being. This Archetype remained unconscious until a visitor to the factory set off their alarms with her cell phone (the Bane Mother, who lived in the factory, was particularly sensitive to the frequencies used by such phones). Woken by the alarm, the Archetype escaped the factory with Maria Jackson, a thirteen-year-old girl and a new neighbor of Sarah Jane Smith. With Sarah Jane, Maria and the Archetype later returned to the factory to attempt to thwart the Bane's control of the human race. They were cornered and nearly killed before the Archetype came upon a solution to kill the Bane Mother using an interstellar communicator and saved himself, his new friends, and the human race. Seeing how much help the children had been and that the Archetype had nowhere to go, Sarah Jane overcame her reluctance to allow anyone else to become involved in her dangerous life and adopted the Archetype. She named him Luke, and Mr. Smith, the secret alien computer living in her attic, fabricated the necessary birth and adoption records.

Soon after starting school, Luke endangered the Earth when he was tricked into providing technical information to a member of the Slitheen, a family of criminals from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius. Several of the aliens were posing as teachers at the school, and when Luke's maths teacher asked him to solve a "theoretical" problem to "test" him, Luke obliged without hesitation. As a result, the Slitheen were able to steal and store the power of the sun. Luke, who had been expressing fears that he would not be able to function in normal human society, took it hard. He saw his actions as a grave social error; later, he undid his mistake and saved the Earth once again, but at least some of his self-doubt would remain. At this time, Luke also met Clyde Langer. He and Maria initially spent some time with Clyde at school while avoiding giving him any information about their less than normal extracurricular activities, but they were unable to prevent him witnessing more than enough of the altercation with the Slitheen for it to become impossible to continue to keep him out of the loop. Clyde helped fight the Slitheen, and soon became a fast friend and the fourth member of the secret little group of heroes on Bannerman Road.

Over the course of the coming months, including several more run-ins with hostile aliens, Luke formed very close bonds with all his new friends. He was highly attached to Maria, who had been the first person he ever met, and greatly enjoyed spending time with Clyde and following the other boy's (largely futile) attempts to teach him how to be cool. He also became closely attached to Sarah Jane; while he would calmly explain to anyone who asked that she wasn't really his mother, it wasn't long before the pair of them became adjusted to the arrangement and began to behave like a true parent and child. Even by the time he was taken by the rift, however, Luke was still calling her "Sarah Jane" rather than "Mum" in regular conversation (she'd told him to call her by her name -- and despite Clyde trying to tell him that she hadn't actually meant it, Luke took her at her word).

Luke's latest adventure before the rift was arguably the most upsetting one yet. While sitting at home, he and Sarah Jane saw a BBC report on a couple with a missing son whose picture was a perfect match for Luke. Believing Luke was not an invention of the Bane after all, but instead a kidnapped boy named Ashley whose mind the Bane had erased, Sarah Jane willingly turned him over to the authorities when they came to her door following Maria's mother assuming Sarah Jane was a child abductor and calling the police. Mr. Smith had confirmed the match and suggested that Luke lacked a navel because the Bane would have found it offensive and surgically removed it. Thanks to UNIT's intervention, Sarah Jane did not go to prison. Luke, on the other hand, was left trying to live with parents he doesn't remember, surrounded by evidence that he had been an entirely different person before being taken by the Bane. Though these parents are at first kind and understanding (if apparently heartbroken and angry at Sarah Jane), their attitude toward him soon shifts -- Luke is kept locked in his room, forbidden to go to school or see his friends.

In a way, finding out that his "parents" are actually a pair of Slitheen intent on harvesting all his considerable brain energy comes as something of a relief to Luke. Fortunately for him, the Slitheen failed to take into the account that hooking Luke up to a machine that would harvest his telekinetic energy would also allow him to direct that energy himself, and he escaped. Unfortunately for Luke, he immediately ran home just as Sarah Jane and Maria were running to his rescue in the other direction. Luke immediately went straight to Mr. Smith for help, and experienced another terrible betrayal as Mr. Smith revealed himself to be a Xylok intent on destroying the Earth to free his crystalline brethren trapped within. Mr. Smith threatened to kill Clyde, whom he'd captured earlier, if Luke did not allow the computer to harness his telekinetic abilities. Luke submitted, and Mr. Smith used Luke's powers to pull the moon close to the Earth. Sarah Jane returned home in time to save Luke with the help of Maria and her robot dog, K-9, and to load a computer virus into Mr. Smith that caused him to forget his purpose and put the moon back before releasing Luke.

Life had only a few weeks to go back to normal after that, with Luke returning to school and the newly rebooted Mr. Smith issuing a cover story for the affair. Luke is still shaken from the affair, afraid that someone else will try to separate him from his adoptive mother and their friends, when the rift did exactly that.


Writing Sample:
Alone for once, Luke trots absently along the way home from school, mind already on his homework. He doesn't mind homework, at least when it's math or science. It took him a while to get why the other kids all hate doing homework -- learning's sort of the point of school, and his teachers have been giving him stuff from beyond his grade level to keep him busy. He can sort of understand it when he thinks about his English homework, though; the thought that he's going to have to spend tonight trying to puzzle through more of Romeo and Juliet is not an uplifting one.

Something catches his eye and he pauses, thoughts brought back to the world around him. He can't say what it was, but for a moment there was some sort of flicker -- something that didn't seem quite right. He frowns, brow furrowing, and takes a step backward to try to see it again. "Hello?" he calls tentatively, peering into the shrubbery. "Is someone there?"

There's another...something. Luke looks around, wondering for a moment if he should go get Sarah Jane or Clyde or Maria. But no, it's probably nothing much, and it might be gone by the time he gets back. Shrugging his backpack straps further up on his shoulders, Luke wades into the greenery by the walkway where he thinks he saw it. Maybe it's something that's been cloaked, or maybe it's an alien -- or maybe it's nothing and he's tearing his jeans for no good reason. He stoops and pushes his hands through the branches, looking, and --

And there's a sideways jerk, a feeling of falling, and he stumbles and lands on his rear in shallow water. Gasping in surprise (and cold!), he flails, splashing, and scrambles to his feet. He shivers violently as he looks around, wide eyes taking in his suddenly changed surroundings. It's...a fountain? He's fallen in a fountain, but he doesn't know how, since he's never even seen this place before he did so.

"Where am I?"


Anything else?
NO