The Games app
Sep. 26th, 2012 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixiepleaseOUT of CHARACTER
Name: Siobhan
Other characters: None
IN CHARACTER
Name: Patricia “Trixie” Dixon (Trixie, please)
Fandom: Black Jack Justice
Canon point/AU: End of Season 7
Journal:trixieplease
Icon:
Headshot:
History: Trixie was born a little hellcat, and by the time she was out of pigtails she was making it known by means beyond upsetting the elderly neighbor and pushing the boys at school. She prefers not to talk about her juvenile record, partly because it makes her more interesting. There’s nothing much to the actual rap; a few counts of B&E and the kind of indiscretion that could only be a crime if you were a golden-haired young lady in the days when simply being female was cause for suspicion. So it’s much more fun to be coy. Suffice it to say she spent her years of blossoming into a young lady interred at the school for wayward girls she prefers to think of as Our Lady of Maximum Security.
Trixie’s strong personality was, in the end, more than a match for the raging of nuns. She’d hate for it to get out, but she mainly used her powers for good at the time. he had mean bones in her body--several of them-- but that was no call to turn them on fellow victims. There were girls interred alongside her far more unfortunate as well as girls whose entire skeletal systems boasted a hyperdense meanness core, and Trixie acted as a buffer between the two.
Once legal adulthood won her emancipation, Trixie went on breaking her mother’s heart. It was habit by then. While Ma and Pa Dixon had been hoping their little girl would, at most, try out secretarial school before finding a nice man. Trixie Dixon did not believe in nice men.
Instead, she turned the skills she’d learned on the inside to profitable employment. To be tough, fearless, tactless, and wary was of no use to a secretary, but handy for a private detective. Trixie’s early business was almost entirely divorce cases. She found a niche in providing a sympathetic ear to cheated-upon (or cheating) wives and girlfriends who didn’t want to pour out their troubles to a thick-necked thug in a fedora and trench coat. When a simple divorce case ballooned into a ribald tale of sex, murder, mob violence, and property crime (nothing’s ever easy) complete with hit-men sent after loose ends like lady detectives, Trixie reluctantly accepted a little help. She joined forces with Jack Justice, hired by the other half of the dueling couple and just as embroiled. After accepting that he’d saved her life a few times, had a complimentary skill set to her own, and made unusually good coffee, Trixie accepted the second desk in his office. Just because she’d been evicted from her own on account of a couple hired killers. Landlords.
Trixie and Jack got along like a couple of Tasmanian Devils locked in a shipping crate with one steak, but they hated each other a little less than everyone else, and two private dicks could do more work than one. Trixie didn’t get her name on the door until after Jack was forced to shoot his old partner (turned mob boss) to save her, but she considered that fair. Twisted, ribald yarns of love gone wrong and sex gone right paid most of the bills, but there’d always be the roiling underworld of Toronto bubbling up. C’est la vie.
Presentation: “Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective” reads the business card. Trixie’s perfectly well aware she’s working within the confines of an old boys’ club, and found it effective to own her peculiarities from the first. Nowadays she works for the Firm of Justice and Dixon, but the introduction stuck. Her approach to branding encapsulates Trixie’s approach to most any social situation, which is to play a caricature of herself.
Trixie has the advantage of being a leggy blonde at a time and place where the traits are much appreciated. At any given moment, she might use this handy framework to put on the airs of a society dame, all elegance and taste (to look at, at least; she’s not quite so good at the mannerisms as the look). She can be a hard-bitten, ruthless bloodhound on the trail, beretta in hand and .28 strapped around her thigh, steely-eyed angel of death. Sultry, inviting seductress. Chipper piece of arm candy. Trixie is pretty in the most popular mold of her day, but most of her vaulted powers of attraction are all attitude. Most of the men she chews up and spits out hardly even mind. Perfectly incapable of settling down, she keeps a few admirers in the wings, picks up any well-dressed supplicant or piece of beefcake who strikes her fancy, and strings the others along until they cease to be useful.
The Cheshire Trixie isn’t quite so capricious in her professional capacity. When dealing with clients, it falls on her to seem like a competent detective most of the time. Jack certainly won’t. She does the talking with three-quarters of the clients, drawing up tidy contracts ($39.95 Canadian Dollars per day, plus expenses) and bustling about with files to make sure they don’t look like a couple loonies who sneaked into an office while the real detective were away. Jack Justice is the one man she can almost never disarm,literally or figuratively, feels no attraction to (thank heaven), and sincerely if grudgingly respects. They banter constantly, like either an old married couple or a television comedy routine depending on who you ask, but she’s forthright with Ol’ Square-jaw in a way that no one else has quite earned. She teases friends and foes in the police department, but takes no guff in return and refuses to allow the slightest crack in her hypercompetent armor in their presence. If, for some reason, she’s operating on the level with criminals or other detectives, she’s just as fierce.
The world’s not ready for a Girl Detective, but that’s the world’s problem.
Motivations:
While Trixie’s public persona is a performance grounded in gleeful exaggeration and exacting self-control, it’s not all that much removed from herself. Trixie really is brave to the point of foolhardiness when the money or the morality is right, convinced of her own vast superiority to most of the world, detached near the point of sociopathy, and unconcerned with the wishes of the world. She’s just willing to take a moment or two off when she’s home with the dog and a good radio program.
There are aspects of Trixie that don’t make it out into the air. She’s patient and scholarly enough to be a good researcher and well-read, but no one’s scared of a detective who spends an afternoon at the library, no matter how useful the newspaper records can be. She’s set in her ways, something she owns as a badge of stubborn contrariness to her friends in a way that mostly hides her real discomfort with the monied, the countryside, this ridiculous television thing. The tender spots in her heart are difficult to reach, but once touched, a moment of pathos sticks. She’s very careful to minimize the times her belief in a person’s goodness or innocence has nearly gotten her killed. (Fortunately, the same thing happens to Jack whenever a sloe-eyed bunny rabbit with a sob story comes into the office.)
Indeed, artifice and distance are so much a part of Trixie’s life that she hardly knows the truth of the matter anymore. She also doesn’t much care. She does enjoy observing the strange comings and goings of the rest of the human wreckage, but turning that sharp eye inward is against her nature.
That said, there are things about herself that Trixie knows and owns. She doesn’t have any interest in being Mrs. Anybody, and keeping a rotating harem keeps her amused. Nothing wrong with that. Mobsters and murderers sometimes need to be put down, and when it’s her or some other guy, Trixie choses Trixie. She’s too stubborn to walk off a case (or, say, go intro protective custody) even if she’s walking into a hit. She’s mean, cynical, suspicious, and shallow, and damn, does she enjoy it.
SAMPLES
Thread: After a few too many years in this gig, a girl can forget how the civilians see the world. Things are not always what they seem, a detective learns in the first moment of the first day, usually when overpaying for the sign on the door. The idea that the face of a thing might be the meat of the thing can get to be as peculiar as Jimmy Wong’s Mystery Chop Suey.
So as Ol’ Square-jaw, The Mighty King, and yours truly welcomed our newest client one very long afternoon, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mr. Jameson was young, polite without being mousy, easy on the eyes, and well-liked by the dog. King usually only drools on the shoes of old friends. And Button-Down Theo, but only because even Toronto’s laziest mutt can appreciate the joys of inconveniencing Theo.
Jameson’ story was what really had me leery, though. Leerier than usual. Pleasant, handsome men do exist, though rarely outside museum collections. A young widower with two kids, sure. It’s a big world and anything can happen. But injured in a tragic train derailment, seeking a sister he’d never met in the desperate hope that she might be able to give a home to his little girls before savings ran out?
If this had been a Mrs. Jameson, Jack would have been falling all over himself to offer succor already. Maybe it was half my disinclination to play the gorilla’s precise counterpart that made me determined to find out just what this joker’s angle was.
Prose: Trixie hadn’t decided until she got into the room whether she wanted to play or not. On the one hand, giving the right impression was something of a specialty of hers. On the other, Trixie Dixon didn’t do what she was told no matter how useful it might prove to be.
The decision was unfortunately out of her hands. Trixie had combat training, but it all depended on good old friend firearms. She had a vague idea that a bow and arrow was something that existed, but what it might have to do with her carefully honed quick-draw skills she didn’t know. She’d used a knife or a blackjack on occasion, and sometimes even effectively, but even if she saw one she liked, she knew that the kind of flailing she did with the more barbaric instruments wouldn’t look good. Jumping out of a closet and bashing a guy over the head was a great tactic, but it looked silly. Doubly so when you were doing it to a dummy. And survival? She was great at that, if it was a matter of surviving a dark alley full of shoe-imperiling puddles and muggers. She didn’t even recognize fire starting tools. She used a Zippo. Gift from an old flame.
A room full of unfriendly eyes and useless tools. Might as well be back at school. She’d gotten through that mostly by bluffing wildly until the bluster felt real, but convincing a bunch of girls you knew all their secrets and had favors to call in wasn’t much like impressing the official board of psychotics.
But she’d do what she could. Swallowing her modesty (a reticent little rodent of an impulse at the best of times), she picked up a knife from the table in its sheath. There was no strap of the right kind, but she’d had to improvise before. Trixie pulled off her scarf and forced it into the belt loops, reached under her skirt, and tied it neatly around her upper thigh. She turned back as though distracted at the library and mildly miffed about it, whipped the knife back out with a movement she was glad to find translated, and held it with a casual grace between two fingers. The “I have killed men and find it more of an inconvenience than anything else” look.
“So what’s next, Peaches?”
What is your character scored: Realistically, Trixie scores a four or a five. She’s got combat training and reflexes with experience and confidence to back her up, but she’s also a firearms specialist and all her survival experience is urban. She stalks the sandwich counter and the bus station, not the wilderness. She’s also five foot ten and skinny. Great at hopping out from behind a chest of drawers. Not so great at brutal combat in hostile environs.
Name: Siobhan
Other characters: None
IN CHARACTER
Name: Patricia “Trixie” Dixon (Trixie, please)
Fandom: Black Jack Justice
Canon point/AU: End of Season 7
Journal:
trixiepleaseIcon:
Headshot:
History: Trixie was born a little hellcat, and by the time she was out of pigtails she was making it known by means beyond upsetting the elderly neighbor and pushing the boys at school. She prefers not to talk about her juvenile record, partly because it makes her more interesting. There’s nothing much to the actual rap; a few counts of B&E and the kind of indiscretion that could only be a crime if you were a golden-haired young lady in the days when simply being female was cause for suspicion. So it’s much more fun to be coy. Suffice it to say she spent her years of blossoming into a young lady interred at the school for wayward girls she prefers to think of as Our Lady of Maximum Security.
Trixie’s strong personality was, in the end, more than a match for the raging of nuns. She’d hate for it to get out, but she mainly used her powers for good at the time. he had mean bones in her body--several of them-- but that was no call to turn them on fellow victims. There were girls interred alongside her far more unfortunate as well as girls whose entire skeletal systems boasted a hyperdense meanness core, and Trixie acted as a buffer between the two.
Once legal adulthood won her emancipation, Trixie went on breaking her mother’s heart. It was habit by then. While Ma and Pa Dixon had been hoping their little girl would, at most, try out secretarial school before finding a nice man. Trixie Dixon did not believe in nice men.
Instead, she turned the skills she’d learned on the inside to profitable employment. To be tough, fearless, tactless, and wary was of no use to a secretary, but handy for a private detective. Trixie’s early business was almost entirely divorce cases. She found a niche in providing a sympathetic ear to cheated-upon (or cheating) wives and girlfriends who didn’t want to pour out their troubles to a thick-necked thug in a fedora and trench coat. When a simple divorce case ballooned into a ribald tale of sex, murder, mob violence, and property crime (nothing’s ever easy) complete with hit-men sent after loose ends like lady detectives, Trixie reluctantly accepted a little help. She joined forces with Jack Justice, hired by the other half of the dueling couple and just as embroiled. After accepting that he’d saved her life a few times, had a complimentary skill set to her own, and made unusually good coffee, Trixie accepted the second desk in his office. Just because she’d been evicted from her own on account of a couple hired killers. Landlords.
Trixie and Jack got along like a couple of Tasmanian Devils locked in a shipping crate with one steak, but they hated each other a little less than everyone else, and two private dicks could do more work than one. Trixie didn’t get her name on the door until after Jack was forced to shoot his old partner (turned mob boss) to save her, but she considered that fair. Twisted, ribald yarns of love gone wrong and sex gone right paid most of the bills, but there’d always be the roiling underworld of Toronto bubbling up. C’est la vie.
Presentation: “Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective” reads the business card. Trixie’s perfectly well aware she’s working within the confines of an old boys’ club, and found it effective to own her peculiarities from the first. Nowadays she works for the Firm of Justice and Dixon, but the introduction stuck. Her approach to branding encapsulates Trixie’s approach to most any social situation, which is to play a caricature of herself.
Trixie has the advantage of being a leggy blonde at a time and place where the traits are much appreciated. At any given moment, she might use this handy framework to put on the airs of a society dame, all elegance and taste (to look at, at least; she’s not quite so good at the mannerisms as the look). She can be a hard-bitten, ruthless bloodhound on the trail, beretta in hand and .28 strapped around her thigh, steely-eyed angel of death. Sultry, inviting seductress. Chipper piece of arm candy. Trixie is pretty in the most popular mold of her day, but most of her vaulted powers of attraction are all attitude. Most of the men she chews up and spits out hardly even mind. Perfectly incapable of settling down, she keeps a few admirers in the wings, picks up any well-dressed supplicant or piece of beefcake who strikes her fancy, and strings the others along until they cease to be useful.
The Cheshire Trixie isn’t quite so capricious in her professional capacity. When dealing with clients, it falls on her to seem like a competent detective most of the time. Jack certainly won’t. She does the talking with three-quarters of the clients, drawing up tidy contracts ($39.95 Canadian Dollars per day, plus expenses) and bustling about with files to make sure they don’t look like a couple loonies who sneaked into an office while the real detective were away. Jack Justice is the one man she can almost never disarm,literally or figuratively, feels no attraction to (thank heaven), and sincerely if grudgingly respects. They banter constantly, like either an old married couple or a television comedy routine depending on who you ask, but she’s forthright with Ol’ Square-jaw in a way that no one else has quite earned. She teases friends and foes in the police department, but takes no guff in return and refuses to allow the slightest crack in her hypercompetent armor in their presence. If, for some reason, she’s operating on the level with criminals or other detectives, she’s just as fierce.
The world’s not ready for a Girl Detective, but that’s the world’s problem.
Motivations:
While Trixie’s public persona is a performance grounded in gleeful exaggeration and exacting self-control, it’s not all that much removed from herself. Trixie really is brave to the point of foolhardiness when the money or the morality is right, convinced of her own vast superiority to most of the world, detached near the point of sociopathy, and unconcerned with the wishes of the world. She’s just willing to take a moment or two off when she’s home with the dog and a good radio program.
There are aspects of Trixie that don’t make it out into the air. She’s patient and scholarly enough to be a good researcher and well-read, but no one’s scared of a detective who spends an afternoon at the library, no matter how useful the newspaper records can be. She’s set in her ways, something she owns as a badge of stubborn contrariness to her friends in a way that mostly hides her real discomfort with the monied, the countryside, this ridiculous television thing. The tender spots in her heart are difficult to reach, but once touched, a moment of pathos sticks. She’s very careful to minimize the times her belief in a person’s goodness or innocence has nearly gotten her killed. (Fortunately, the same thing happens to Jack whenever a sloe-eyed bunny rabbit with a sob story comes into the office.)
Indeed, artifice and distance are so much a part of Trixie’s life that she hardly knows the truth of the matter anymore. She also doesn’t much care. She does enjoy observing the strange comings and goings of the rest of the human wreckage, but turning that sharp eye inward is against her nature.
That said, there are things about herself that Trixie knows and owns. She doesn’t have any interest in being Mrs. Anybody, and keeping a rotating harem keeps her amused. Nothing wrong with that. Mobsters and murderers sometimes need to be put down, and when it’s her or some other guy, Trixie choses Trixie. She’s too stubborn to walk off a case (or, say, go intro protective custody) even if she’s walking into a hit. She’s mean, cynical, suspicious, and shallow, and damn, does she enjoy it.
SAMPLES
Thread: After a few too many years in this gig, a girl can forget how the civilians see the world. Things are not always what they seem, a detective learns in the first moment of the first day, usually when overpaying for the sign on the door. The idea that the face of a thing might be the meat of the thing can get to be as peculiar as Jimmy Wong’s Mystery Chop Suey.
So as Ol’ Square-jaw, The Mighty King, and yours truly welcomed our newest client one very long afternoon, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mr. Jameson was young, polite without being mousy, easy on the eyes, and well-liked by the dog. King usually only drools on the shoes of old friends. And Button-Down Theo, but only because even Toronto’s laziest mutt can appreciate the joys of inconveniencing Theo.
Jameson’ story was what really had me leery, though. Leerier than usual. Pleasant, handsome men do exist, though rarely outside museum collections. A young widower with two kids, sure. It’s a big world and anything can happen. But injured in a tragic train derailment, seeking a sister he’d never met in the desperate hope that she might be able to give a home to his little girls before savings ran out?
If this had been a Mrs. Jameson, Jack would have been falling all over himself to offer succor already. Maybe it was half my disinclination to play the gorilla’s precise counterpart that made me determined to find out just what this joker’s angle was.
Prose: Trixie hadn’t decided until she got into the room whether she wanted to play or not. On the one hand, giving the right impression was something of a specialty of hers. On the other, Trixie Dixon didn’t do what she was told no matter how useful it might prove to be.
The decision was unfortunately out of her hands. Trixie had combat training, but it all depended on good old friend firearms. She had a vague idea that a bow and arrow was something that existed, but what it might have to do with her carefully honed quick-draw skills she didn’t know. She’d used a knife or a blackjack on occasion, and sometimes even effectively, but even if she saw one she liked, she knew that the kind of flailing she did with the more barbaric instruments wouldn’t look good. Jumping out of a closet and bashing a guy over the head was a great tactic, but it looked silly. Doubly so when you were doing it to a dummy. And survival? She was great at that, if it was a matter of surviving a dark alley full of shoe-imperiling puddles and muggers. She didn’t even recognize fire starting tools. She used a Zippo. Gift from an old flame.
A room full of unfriendly eyes and useless tools. Might as well be back at school. She’d gotten through that mostly by bluffing wildly until the bluster felt real, but convincing a bunch of girls you knew all their secrets and had favors to call in wasn’t much like impressing the official board of psychotics.
But she’d do what she could. Swallowing her modesty (a reticent little rodent of an impulse at the best of times), she picked up a knife from the table in its sheath. There was no strap of the right kind, but she’d had to improvise before. Trixie pulled off her scarf and forced it into the belt loops, reached under her skirt, and tied it neatly around her upper thigh. She turned back as though distracted at the library and mildly miffed about it, whipped the knife back out with a movement she was glad to find translated, and held it with a casual grace between two fingers. The “I have killed men and find it more of an inconvenience than anything else” look.
“So what’s next, Peaches?”
What is your character scored: Realistically, Trixie scores a four or a five. She’s got combat training and reflexes with experience and confidence to back her up, but she’s also a firearms specialist and all her survival experience is urban. She stalks the sandwich counter and the bus station, not the wilderness. She’s also five foot ten and skinny. Great at hopping out from behind a chest of drawers. Not so great at brutal combat in hostile environs.
