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P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Kat
OOC Journal:chasmas though it hardly gets used
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope.
Email + IM: celtically@gmail.com, auctumnae@aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: James Tiberius Kirk
Canon: Star Trek (reboot movies)
Original or Alternate Universe: Original flavor
Canon Point: After he wakes up in the hospital in Star Trek: Into Darkness
Number: RNG me, bro.
Setting: Have a link to Memory Alpha.
History:James Tiberius Kirk was born on January 4, 2233. Unfortunately, this was also the day his father died saving a bunch of lives from the giant-ass claw-like Romulan ship that appeared out of a weird lightning storm in space in front of the ship he was in and decided it was time to play Let's Shoot the USS Kelvin.
We don't know much of Jim's childhood, but what we do know makes it clear it wasn't the best. Jim's mother either re-married or moved in with Jim's uncle Frank (it depends on if you go with the novelization or not) and Frank was Not A Nice Guy. Winona Kirk stayed with Starfleet and was off-planet enough for it to be significant. Jim's older brother Sam ran away from home at least once and when Jim was eleven(ish) he drove a 1965 Chevy Corvette Stingray off a cliff. No, I don't know how they have cliffs in Iowa in the 2200s. They just do.
The next time we see Jim, he's twenty-one and tipsy in a bar in Riverside. This is where he meets, and flirts with, Nyota Uhura, one of the people destined to be part of the Epic Crew of Epicness. Fortunately, the flirting attracts the attention of some manry macho men Starfleet cadets and Jim gets his ass handed to him in a barfight.
No, you didn't read that wrong, this is a fortunate thing. It just so happens that the man who breaks up the fight is one Captain Pike and, after recognizing Jim, he sits him down for what is to be a Very Important Talk.
Pike gives Jim a talk about his parents and tells him all about how Starfleet is Important. "It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada." Jim, of course, is having none of this. Because he is a badass since he's the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest. Pike cuts through all of Jim's bullshit, though, and calls him out on the Troubled Youth thing Jim's been pulling for the past few years and then emotionally sucker punches him while daring him to make something of himself. Pike, you sly bastard.
Pike dares Kirk to join Starfleet to out-do his dad, Jim pulls an all-nighter and ends up on the shuttle for new Fleet recruits where he meets his future biffle Leonard McCoy.
FAST FORWARD THREE YEARS and Jim is making out with a green alien chick. Surprise, surprise. As much as it may not seem like it, this scene is important because alien chick’s roommate (who is actually Uhura) interrupts make-out sessions and mentions a transmission she picked up while being a geek and studying outside of class. This will come up later.
Jim then shows off his 1337 hacking skills by hacking the computers on a simulation test. This gets him in trouble and he has an academic hearing. This hearing is where he meets his other future biffle-slash-future heterosexual life-partner, Spock. They rub each other the wrong way but before things can get really ugly, there’s a distress signal from Vulcan and all the cadets are shipped out. Bones has to sneak Jim on board the Enterprise as he’s technically on academic probation and should be grounded, but s’all good.
SOME MORE STUFF HAPPENS and the lightning storm in space from twenty-four odd years ago and the giant-claw ship return. More shit happens and it’s a lot of action sequences with introductions to Chekov and Sulu thrown in there and in the end, the planet Vulcan goes poof and Pike, who’d been captaining the Enterprise has been captured.
Then there are arguments. And Spock, who is Acting Captain in Pike’s absence, gets pissed at Jim and maroons him on Hoth— I mean on Delta Vega.
Jim gets chased by wild animals that try to eat him and is saved by Leonard Nimoy. It turns out Leonard Nimoy is actually Ambassador Spock and both he and the pissy Romulans in the giant claw ship from hell are ~from the future~. (This fact and the fact that there’s alternate universe stuff involved was actually discovered earlier, but that part of the movie was summarized in the ‘Then there are arguments,’ part of this background section.)
Anyways, there’s a Fleet base on Delta Vega and OldSpock and Jim travel there and meet… Scotty! Who beams himself and Jim aboard the Enterprise. But before they leave, OldSpock gives Jim a mission and that is to rile YoungSpock up enough to admit that he is emotionally compromised enough to not be a good captain. So once they get on board, Jim hurts his future manwife’s feelings and takes over for him as captain.
What follows are a few moments of character development and planning that really don’t have anything to do with Jim other than Spock coming to his senses just before going off on what could be a suicide mission with Jim where they beam aboard the claw ship, kick Romulan ass, save Captain Pike, get the crap that created the black hole that started this whole time-travel/alternate universe nonsense the fuck out of the Romulan's hands and save Earth all in one fell, badass, lenseflared swoop.
Seriously. That’s the next thirty-odd minutes of the movie.
The rest of it is Jim being pardoned from cheating, being made the official captain of the Enterprise and then the entire crew being on the bridge and looking like GQMFs while Nimoy does a voice over of the famous “Space… the final frontier,” speech.
Well. All save Scotty who is in the bowels of the Enterprise with the ship’s “ample nacelles.”
The sequel opens on a planet called Nibiru where Jim, genius that he is, has stolen the native's holy scroll and is running like hell because they want to kill him. But don't worry! It's all according to plan! He's just getting them a safe distance from the massive volcano that's about to erupt. Because that's clearly a fantastic plan.
Anyways, he and Bones (who had been arranging transport for the two of them) ditch the scroll a safe distance away and decide to cliff jump into the ocean so they can swim back to the Enterprise which is parked underwater. Once they're safely back on the bridge, they talk to Spock who is stuck inside the volcano and setting off a cold fusion device to basically freeze all the lava. Nevermind that cold fusion doesn't actually work like that. Jim decides that saving Spock is more important than following the Prime Directive, so they fly over the volcano, exposing themselves to the natives in the process, beam Spock up to the ship, and zip back to Earth like everything is fine and dandy!!
Except it's not because Jim is a little shit who not only broke a cardinal rule, he also lied about doing so. As a result, he loses the Enterprise. WAY TO GO, JIMMY BOY. But it's not all bad. Pike gives him a needed smackdown and then, later, finds Jim in a bar and they have a touching not!father/not!son moment where Pike says that he's back in charge of the Enterprise and Jim's going to be his First Officer. It's a great moment which means, of course, that things are about to go to hell in a handbasket.
They're called into a meeting with a bunch of other high-ranking Starfleet officers where they hear about a dude named John Harrison blowing up an archive in London. Jim, smart guy he is, figures out that Harrison did it just to get all these guys in a room together. Unfortunately, he figures it out about thirty seconds before Harrison, in a stolen ship, fires on the conference room.
Then there's action! Lensflares! People screaming! And Jim playing Big Damn Hero and making the ship crash. Harrison escapes though and beams himself to Kronos, the Klingon homeworld. And when Jim was off playing hero, Pike died. Yep. Every Startrek movie so far has opened with one of Jim's parents/parental figures dying. I fear for his mother.
Anyways... When Jim finds out where Harrison went, he goes to the head of Starfleet, an Admiral Marcus, to request permission to go after the bastard. Marcus lets him do it, but only if he takes a bunch of crazy missiles he designed to fire on him as well. Jim, angry and grieving, decides to go with it even though Starfleet isn't, actually, a militarized group.
There's a lot of little things that happen next, mostly people disagreeing with Jim and trying to talk sense into him. Scotty up and quits because Jim's being a hardheaded idiot focused on revenge. And Carol Marcus fakes a transfer onto the Enterprise which will be relevant later. Eventually, Jim decides that he's going to do the right thing and bring Harrison in for trial. So, of course, he takes Spock and Uhura with him down to Kronos to try and get this guy. But nothing ever goes right for Jim Kirk and they're discovered by the Klingons. Oops.
Harrison, oddly enough, saves them and surrenders. Yeah, they don't get it either. But they lock him up in the bridge and Bones takes a blood sample to do some tests because Harrison is obviously superhuman. There's a lot of weird conversations and "NO REALLY I'M NOT A BAD GUY. CHECK OUT THIS STUFF TO PROVE IT," dialogue that leads to the crew trying to open one of the mystery missiles to see what exactly in inside them. Since, you know, they're kind of stuck in Klingon space anyways since something ~mysteriously~ went wrong with their warp drive, so they might as well.
And inside is... A human popsicle! No, I'm not kidding. It's a dude in a cryotube. There's another interrogation in the brig scene and Harrison reveals that his name isn't actually Harrison, it's Khan. Even though he's a white British dude. And all those human popsicles in the missiles? Yeah, they're his crew. Khan was supposedly being used by Marcus because Marcus wanted to start a war with the Klingons because he's a power hungry dick.
Then guess who shows up? If you guessed Marcus, you're right! Him and his giant-ass, minimally crewed, super advanced starship show up right by the Enterprise. Who, of course, calls him out on his shit. Marcus decides that he can't have any of that and the real action begins. There's a bit of a chase scene and then the Enterprise basically gets nearly destroyed. But before Marcus can deal the finishing blow, Scotty intervenes! Yes, Scotty. Just after the first brig scene, Jim asked him to check out this thing Khan told them about and that landed him on Marcus' ship.
But Scotty can only do so much. So Jim and Khan spacejump over to Marcus' ship to take it down from the inside. Khan, as it turns out, really was a bad guy all along. Predictably enough, he betrays everyone once they take the bridge and kills Admiral Marcus. He negotiates with Spock for the torpedoes and Spock, in a very Jim-like move, says okay we'll give you the torpedoes for our crewmates. Except he gives Khan armed torpedoes lacking in their human popsicles. They blow up and damage a significant amount of Marcus' ship, and both it and the Enterprise start falling to Earth.
Turns out something's wrong in the warp core of the Enterprise. Scotty says the only way to fix it would go into this highly irradiated area and realign the things that are misaligned, but you'd be dead before you could get there. Jim says fuck you to death and does it anyways, saving what's left of his crew. But he's only human so he does eventually die of radiation poisoning, but not before he has a very tear-worthy goodbye scene with Spock.
An emotionally compromised Spock goes after Khan and brings him back to Bones who thinks he can use Khan's blood to bring Jim back to life. Remember that blood sample he took earlier? Yeah, he randomly injected it into a dead tribble because that's clearly what you do with superhuman blood when you have it. Luckily for the plot, though, it does actually work to bring Jim back from the dead. He wakes up two weeks later in the hospital. Aaaaand a little while after waking up in the hospital is Jim's pullpoint! So that's that. I'm sorry you've had to read all the way through this. I can't help but mock the canon terribly even when I love it so.
Personality:The first thing people usually notice about James Tiberius Kirk is his massive ego. It's pretty much the size of a small planet. Jim is cocky and over-confident, and everyone and their great aunt Bertha knows it. In his head, there's next to nothing he can't do if he just puts his mind to it. It's a strange combination of awareness of his considerably mental abilities and fierce determination.
Because if there's anything Jim Kirk is, it's one determined son of a bitch. His big thing is that he doesn't believe in no-win scenarios. If there isn't a good way out readily available, well. He'll just make one and steamroller over everyone who gets in his way. Once Jim's set his mind to something, come hell or high water, he will do what it is he wants to do. And it'll take a whole hell of a lot to even slow him down, much less stop him. This is, generally, a good thing. When he gets too wrapped up in his head and starts making poor decisions (see: the beginning of Star Trek: Into Darkness where he almost bombed the crap out of the Klingon homeworld) it's a terrible thing. But for the most part, Jim uses his powers for good not evil.
Mostly, he uses his determination to help his crew and other people. He does it with the natives on Nibiru, he does it with Spock, he does it with the entire crew of the Enterprise multiple times... Truth is, Jim's a bit of a bleeding heart. He latches onto people fairly quickly and once he's decided they're friends or people worth caring about, there's no getting rid of him. He's sort of like a fungus that way. Jim cares easily, and he also cares incredibly deeply. There is nothing in the world more important to him than his crew. Not Starfleet regulations. Not even his own life. He would give anything for them without a second thought. His entire thesis was written on the fact that a captain really needs to know his ship and his crew inside and out to really be able to do them justice. Considering the ginormous ego and the bit of a selfish streak he has, that's saying a lot.
Part of the reason he's like that is because he wasn't hugged enough as a child. Jim grew up with a runaway brother, and absent mother, and a step-father that was, at best, a verbally and emotionally abusive drunk. Because of that, he wants to love and be loved, to know and be known almost desperately. It's not something he shows. Like, ever. Jimmy Kirk is a master at hiding his issues behind a smile and a smart remark. But he's a little bit fucked up. It's hard enough not to be with his upbringing, but he's also got a past as a drunken repeat-offender. Self-destructive behavior was practically a second middle name. He's come a long way since the regular bar fights and nights spent in prison, but there's always a bit of him that's going to be that scrappy punk kid. It shows up when he talks with Pike in ST:ID. "That was a good fight," he says in reference to a fight in which he got totally trashed. Getting his ass handed to him was something good. That right there says a lot.
But Jim's not just a fucked up twenty-something. Like I said, he's come a long way from his dark Iowa days. Most of the time, he's a genuinely fun, charismatic guy. Sure, he drinks recreationally and maybe gets a little too drunk sometimes. Yeah, he likes sex a lot, and he maybe likes dangerous odds a little more than he should. But that's just part of what makes him fun. He likes having a good time and bantering with people. Witty repartee is one of his favorite pastimes. (Which is a good thing considering the Enterprise should really have been named the USS Sassypants for how snarky its crew is.) He's one of those guys that's absolutely ridiculous, but you can't help but like him. Jim's the life of the party, and he enjoys making people smile. It's part of what makes him a good captain.
The other things that make him really damn good at his job, other than the fact that he's a genius, are his natural curiosity and leadership skills. Jim loves learning. He loves exploring and finding new things out. We don't get to see too much of it in the films since they're action movies, but we do catch a glimpse of it. When he's talking to Spock about maybe getting a five year exploration mission, he's practically dancing with excitement. It just bubbles up out of him when he thinks about getting to explore uncharted territory. And he's just really good at leading people. It comes instinctively to him. Starfleet didn't give him the flagship because he saved the Earth, they gave it to him because he's damn good at captaining and making his subordinates like him.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:Physically speaking, Jim's just your baseline human. Even though he was raised from the dead like some kind of space Jesus with a superhuman's blood, he's got none of the nifty superhuman-ness that comes with that. He's pretty good at hand-to-hand combat--he was an assistant instructor for the course during his time at Starfleet Academy. Buuuut he also gets his ass kicked a lot. He is a pretty decent shot with a phaser though.
Mentally and emotionally, Jim's pretty damn resilient. That, his uncompromising nature, and his quick mind are his greatest strengths. It allows him to be able to formulate damn good plans on the fly and bullshit his way through a lot of sticky situations. But he's also a giant, squirming ball of vulnerabilities too. His crew is his biggest weak point. They're quite literally everything to him. If you really want to break Jim Kirk, you go for his heart, for the people he cares about. Between his love for them and his overblown sense of responsibility, he'll be down quicker'n you can say licketysplit.
Inventory:→ One (1) Backless hospital gown
→ One (1) Starfleet Captain's uniform composed of gold shirt, black undershirt, black pants, and black boots
→ One (1) Miniature of the USS Kelvin
Appearance: Jim's about six foot and fairly fit. He's got dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, massive eyebrows, and he somehow manages to be incredibly good looking even with that. He's played by Chris Pine and you can see him as Jim here.
Age: 26
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:Waking up from a coma was bad enough, but waking up with a breathing tube shoved down his throat was almost more than Jim could handle. Hadn't he been shit on enough recently? Apparently not, because then the thing gets yanked out of him and the next thing he knows, he's falling onto the floor covered in blue goop. Great. Really. This is just what his week needed.
He hauls himself up into a sitting position and takes a moment to catch his breath. The first thing he notices are the numbers on his arm. Jim, being the history nut that he is, immediately thinks of Bad Things. Those thoughts only get worse when he discovers he can't scrape off the numbers with his admittedly short fingernails. Identification numbers tattooed on a person have usually only meant one thing in all the history he's read, and that sets him on edge.
Carefully, he grabs the nearest steady surface and hauls himself up. Muttered curses fly from his lips as he realizes just how weak his legs are. A few days of physical therapy aren't quite enough to get him fully recovered from radiation poisoning and a two week coma. And that just sucks balls. If he's in a nasty situation, he's going to need to be able to do more than hobble from place to place and hope he doesn't run into anything nasty. But hobbling is all he can do, so hobbling is what he does. Slowly, but confidently he moves from where he tumbled out of the grav couch to the door he can spot. Sitting still has always been difficult for him, even more when there's a puzzle in front of him. So Jim's not going to let something like injuries stop him. (Perish the thought!) He'll just keep truckin' on until he can't truck on no more.
... That may be earlier than he really wants it to be though, if the way his legs ache is any indication. Goddammit.
Comms Sample:[ jim sticks to voice for this because a.) screw texting, and b.) video would give away the fact that he's a little pale and stuck in bed right now. ]
This is Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. I've been given to understand that I've been here before, though I don't remember it. Which, for the record, is incredibly creepy.
Anyways, for those of you that knew me before, I'm sorry that I don't remember you. I would, however, be interested in getting to know you again, if you don't mind starting from page one. Similarly, I'm going to be going through all the information I can find on this place and what's happened here, but if there's anything of note that any of you would like to tell me in your own words, I'd love to hear it.
Kirk out.
personality addendum
Something else we see in XI, though it's much more subtle than what happens in the time-skip, is Jim learning to rely on other people. In the beginning, he's cocky and headstrong. He comes up with wild plans to cheat on the unwinnable test and does so by using a friend. Instead of telling Gaila what he's doing, he takes advantage of her playful nature and post in the command station to get his bug in the Kobayashi Maru programming. As the story moves on, he starts playing Big Damn Hero and is thoroughly convinced that he's right. Like, all the time.
And, admittedly, he is. Jim is completely right in his ideas of what the Enterprise was heading into and later what she should be doing. But instead of doing what any normal person would do, e.g. be respectful of the person currently in the captain's chair, he's argumentative and does a lot of exasperated yelling because no one is listening to him!! And then he promptly gets himself marooned on Delta Vega.
Which is great for him, and not just because he meets Scotty there. Meeting with Old!Spock and finding out about this great friendship he could have with his Spock is the big turning point for him. Up until this point, it's fairly safe to assume that Bones is Jim's only real close friend. Jim's friendly with everyone, certainly. But Bones is someone Jim trusts and would confide in should he ever suddenly decide he needed to get something off his chest. Old!Spock shows him that he can have that kind of friendship with Spock too. Once he sees that and sees what effect the destruction of Vulcan really had on Spock, he shifts a bit. He's still a little shit, but he's now a little shit who works with his bridge crew. They run through theories together. They plan the attack on Nero's ship together. He goes through with that plan with Spock, and he couldn't have done it by himself.
But, like I said earlier, the largest amount of character development comes in ST:ID. It's also the most obvious character development. In fact, this movie could've had a really great JIM KIRK LEARNS HUMILITY story line, but sadly it was dropped about half-way through for KHAAAAAN.
Anyways. When the movie opens, Jim is much the same as he was at the end of XI. He's cocky, he's unwilling to compromise, and he's absolutely willing to break a lot of rules to do whatever he thinks is right. He lies to the admiralty. He, as Pike puts it, plays God and relies on dumb luck to justify his actions. He pulls dangerous all kinds of dangerous stunts and involves his bridge crew in his madcap plans. While he hasn't lost a crew member since the Nero incident, it really is a matter of time until it happens. Jim Kirk is, essentially, a bunch of bad life choices that seem good to him but are really a time bomb waiting to go off.
So Starfleet takes the Enterprise away from him. It's a great move on their part, but it absolutely devastates Jim. Until that moment, he didn't really understand that what he was doing was wrong. It forces him to have a paradigm shift and realize that he's not ready to be captain and he won't be ready until he can learn not to be such a cocky asshole, take responsibility for his actions, and trust his fucking crew. Sadly, all the character development that could have flowed smoothly out of that gets a little... thrown off course, shall we say? By Pike getting killed.
Jim, in his grief, regresses. He goes back to the angry kid who isn't listening to anyone and thinks he's got the right way to get shit done. Spock and Bones both try to talk sense into him, but he has none of it. Scotty up and quitting makes him see sense and he actually starts to listen to people again. He realizes that the mission they're being sent off to do is awful and he really should listen to his XO since he's a pretty smart dude. When they head down to Kronos, he brings Spock and Uhura with him and Uhura basically makes him let her go and talk to the Klingons even though Jim really, really doesn't want to do that. But between her own fierceness and Spock going "Don't piss her off," he gets it through his head that it's okay. They've got this. Check box one on the list of character development, "Trust your fucking crew," gets a nice little checkmark.
Throughout all of this, he's also stuck with the knowledge that he's essentially stranded his crew in the Neutral Zone because he wanted to go off and get revenge. If the Klingons find them, they're dead meat, Starfleet goes to war, and it'll be all his fault. In addition to that, he sends Bones, his best and closest friend, down to a nearby planetoid with Carol Marcus to open a torpedo and take a look inside. This almost gets Bones killed. Jim has to watch as the countdown ticks towards zero and make a decision as to whether or not to beam back Carol or let her try and disarm the torpedo. His curiosity about everything going wrong nearly got his best friend killed. The fact that he can't resist a challenge and had to listen to the maniac that killed his father figure nearly got his best friend killed.
And if that weren't enough, when Admiral Marcus shows up, he says he's going to kill Jim and his entire crew. Marcus can't let them live, since they've found out all his dirty little secrets. Secrets they only found out because Jim kept pushing. When he looks back at his crew, it's clear that he's realizing just how many ramifications his actions have had. "I'm sorry," he says as they're all about to die. And for him that apology wouldn't be anywhere near good enough. In that moment, it looked like Pike was right. He was going to get everyone under his command killed. Ticky box number two, "Taking responsibility for his actions," gets checked off.
Luckily, Scotty saves the day and the Enterprise is saved, at least for a moment. Jim, realizing that there's not much he can do to try and save the rest of his crew now that they're limping along and facing probably the biggest, baddest starship out there, decides to leave Spock in charge of the Enterprise and go after Marcus. When Spock confronts him about this, Jim breaks down. He tells Spock that he's not good enough for the chair. "I don't know what I should do. I only know what I can do," he says. Everything in the movie so far has led up to this moment of Jim admitting that he doesn't have all the answers. "Stop being a cocky asshole and learn some humilty," gets marked off.
It later gets marked off a second time when he still only does what he can do and gives his very life to save his crew. He knows they're all going to die unless someone crawls in there and realigns what needs to be realigned. He's got Engineering crew nearby. Scotty's there. Other people are probably around. He could pass off the duty onto someone else. But there's no guarantees that they could do it and Jim? Jim is one determined son of a bitch, and he knows it. In that moment, he also knows that he's expendable. There will be other people who can captain the Enterprise and do it well, but there's only one person on hand that can climb up there and do what needs to be done. So he does it.
It's unclear whether he realizes that everything he did there made him into the kind of person who is ready to sit in the captain's chair. Certainly by the timeskip when the Enterprise goes off on his five year mission he did. But when he's in the hospital, when he's doing what he can do and in doing so acting like a good captain, it's hard to tell if he knows that's what he's acting like. Or if it's just Jim being Jim. Either way, it's a good thing for everyone that he learned the lessons he did, even if they came at a steep price.