gonna add this later

NAME: Michelle
AGE: 26
CONTACT: sweetstacks
CHARACTERS IN GAME: None


CHARACTER NAME: Rhys
AGE: 27
CANON Borderlands
CANON POINT After the fall of Helios/destroying AI Jack, but before he meets Fiona and the stranger.
HISTORY: Wiki link, but as it's terrible, here's a write-up.

As a sidenote, there are a couple of decisions that can alter Rhys's character! He'll be trusting Jack instead of Fiona and accepting/ruling Hyperion instead of rejecting it.

Our hero(?) Rhys works for Hyperion, pretty much the biggest corporation in the Borderlands universe, on the space station Helios. Unfortunately, he's not that high-ranking; Rhys wants more, and that's how the game kicks off. After finding out that his rival, Hugo Vasquez, has a big deal for a Vault Key, Rhys decides to take fate into his own hands. He, along with his friends Yvette and Vaughn, steal ten million dollars. Rhys and Vaughn head down to Pandora with money in hand. Also unfortunately, Rhys and Vaughn run into trouble: The Vault Key is actually a fake, and part of a con set up by two sisters, Sasha and Fiona, and their partner, Felix. After getting into trouble with Hyperion for stealing 1) Vasquez's car and 2) using Hyperion assets after 3) stealing ten million dollars, Rhys's Hyperion access is revoked.

Luckily, Rhys has a plan: He'll jam the ID drive of a long-dead Hyperion scientist into his brain and assume the guy's identity. But we'll come back to that decision later. The (fake) Vault Key breaks when Rhys's ECHOeye implant acts up (also because of Sasha and Fiona), and the four of them form a grudging, unlikely... alliance? Kind of.

Their plan to recover the money by winning a literal death race fails, and the money literally goes up in flames due to Felix's betrayal of the sisters. The four escape the death race with their lives due to the help of a Vault Hunter, and they end up in an old Atlas hidey-hole. (Not with the Vault Hunter, of course.) Here's where that ID drive comes in. Unbeknownst to Rhys, Nakayama's ID drive actually contains the artificial intelligence of some dude named Handsome Jack.

So now Rhys has Handsome Jack living in his brain--and only Rhys can see and hear him. Back to Fiona and Rhys, though; they find two metal pieces, and only they can pick them up. The pieces connect, and Jack helpfully informs Rhys that it's a Vault map.

A Loader Bot swoops in to save the day, and the gang piles into Sasha and Fiona's caravan. Unfortunately, they run into some trouble. After getting split up, Rhys and Vaughn wander the desert. They run into Hugo Vasquez, who's pretty pissed off--but thankfully, Rhys hacks into the guy's gun and causes it to go haywire, giving Vaughn and Rhys enough time to escape and head to a rendezvous point, Old Haven. Here, Rhys discovers an old Atlas facility--one that is home to the first parts of something called the "Gortys Project." Sasha and Fiona eventually meet up with the guys... only to find that they've been captured by August, who had been expecting ten million dollars in the Vault Key trade.

Probably not the best situation to be in. Anyway, Rhys and Fiona split up to take their places, ordered to do so by Vasquez and August. The two pieces connect for good, to create a metal ball. They, again, face trouble, and here's the first huge decision posed by Tales: Does Rhys trust Fiona, or Handsome Jack?

Rhys trusts Jack. (He gets judged hardcore for it later, as he should.) Jack now has access to his subsystems, and he helps Rhys take care of the robots that threaten to kill everyone due to the Gortys Project's being compromised... by nearly falling off the ledge of a platform and into the abyss. Again, Vaughn, Rhys, Fiona, and Sasha all escape possible death with the help of Loader Bot, only to meet August's mother, Vallory. And she's pretty pissed about not getting her ten million dollars. Fiona tells her it's Vasquez's fault, and Vallory shoots and kills Vasquez. (We'll also come back to that later.)

Vallory leaves, and they discover that the metal ball has a button. The metal ball is actually a little robot, who's absolutely adorable. Her name is Gortys, and she tells them they have to find the pieces of her in order to get to a Vault. For refernce, Gortys is literally the only one who can ground the Vault; it's called the Vault of the Traveler for a reason, as it travels around universes without stopping somewhere for very long. With Gortys fully assembled, she can call the Traveler and get it to stick in one place. They start their journey, joined by a Vault Hunter named Athena--the same Athena who'd been hired by Jack to hunt a vault on the moon. Not long after their escape from Old Haven, Rhys again places his trust in Jack... which upgrades his ECHO Eye and gives Jack even more access.

Smart.

They make it to a dome, where Gortys claims her next piece is. Trouble isn't far behind them, and they secure the energy chassis for Gortys... but lose Athena to another couple of Vault Hunters. Threatened by Vallory and her goons, Rhys and Fiona are forced to look for the next part of Gortys... except it's up on Helios. In Handsome Jack's office. They form a plan: Get a rocket built (courtesy of Athena's girlfriend, Janey), have Rhys disguised as Vasquez, get into the office, and grab the last part. Their ragtag group successfully makes it to Helios, with a single casualty, Scooter, who'd been their mechanic. Somehow, the plan works, though with a few bumps, and Gortys's last part is recovered.

Unfortunately, this is where things start to go very, very wrong. Rhys unknowingly uploads Jack into Hyperion's... everything. Then, Jack offers Rhys another decision: Accept and rule Hyperion, or reject it and continue to be a nobody. Rhys chooses to accept Hyperion, and Jack names him president. To everyone on the ship, including Sasha and Fiona. (They aren't happy about this, obviously, since Pandorans like the sisters despise Hyperion.) All is going well for Rhys...

Until Jack proclaims he's going to bodyjack (heh) Rhys by killing him and then placing an exoskeleton with Jack's consciousness into Rhys. That isn't it, though; Jack plans on doing this with a lot of people. Millions, really--which means the possibility of millions of Handsome Jacks running around. (Think Junko Enoshima, but somehow worse.) Obviously, this isn't cool with Rhys at all, and his opinion of Jack sours. He rejects Jack, and Jack takes this as the ultimate betrayal. All of this comes to a head when he realizes the only option is to get rid of Jack for good. Unfortunately (a lot of "unfortunately"s going on here), Rhys does this... by crashing Helios into Pandora, with thousands of people still on board.

Rhys faces off against Jack one more time after Jack gives a villain speech. In the end, he rips his robot arm out of its socket (so Jack can't control said robot arm to keep Rhys from getting rid of him and/or control said robot arm to strangle the life out of Rhys), yanks the port out of the side of his head, and tears his ECHO Eye implant out of his eye. It's not pretty... and Rhys passes out from the pain. Understandably.

Some time after this, Rhys manages to secure the deed to the Atlas corporation, which Jack had bought and ended up controlling. He takes over the corporation as its CEO, and rebuilds it. He's found soon after by a stranger who captures both him and Fiona and forces them to tell him their whole story--this is the framing device of the whole game. While they tell their story, they recover Gortys's parts; while Rhys had been mutilating himself, Gortys had been completed, and used by Vallory to open the Vault. Unfortunately, a monster lurks inside the Vault, and in the end, Gortys falls apart (literally) in order to save everyone's lives. The parts of her scattered, and needed to be found.

The stranger that captures Rhys and Fiona is actually Loader Bot, who after the fall of Helios used Jack's exoskeleton robot thing to fashion himself a body. Eventually, the three recover all parts of Gortys. Everyone meets up again--even Vaughn, who'd been lost to them after the debacle at the Dome. They assemble Gortys once more, and though she's apprehensive, she agrees. Because they have a Voltron-esque robot to fight the Vault monster--the Traveler. They manage to defeat the Traveler, and Fiona and Rhys enter the Vault. When they reach out to grab the treasures, they disappear to who knows where.

PERSONALITY: From the get-go, one thing about Rhys is absolutely certain: He's kind of a dick. It's not exactly unsurprising, though: Rhys works for the Hyperion Corporation, and when you work for Hyperion, you need to be ruthless. Rhys is just that--ruthless when it becomes to his ambitions. His main goal is to make it to the top of the corporate ladder, and honestly? He'd do pretty much anything to get it, just shy of murder. He's got no qualms about fucking over his rival, Hugo Vasquez, in order to get what he wants. And, really, Vasquez is an even bigger dick, so he kind of deserves it--Rhys isn't wrong about that, at least. Unfortunately for Vasquez, too, since he screwed Rhys out of a promotion he'd been working hard toward, he gets to see just how vengeful Rhys can be.

Spoilers: It's kind of very. Rhys goes to great lengths to get back at Vasquez mostly because he's pissed at Vasquez and hates the guy. Honestly, for a twenty-something-year-old, Rhys can be horrifically petty and rude. When he's annoyed with someone, he's not afraid to let them know; for example, going back to the Vasquez situation, he steals ten million dollars and goes down to Pandora, a planet he's never been to in his life, and goes to steal the deal Vasquez has made. He even mouths off to Handsome Jack when he's annoyed by Jack's calling him "kiddo." Even if he doesn't have a snappy retort to whatever it is that's annoying him, he pouts. A lot. Rhys isn't someone you want to cross, because he'll make sure he gets back at you. Even inappropriately, because Rhys has little tact. Consider when he's teasing Sasha--she's made fun of him, too, to the point where he feels pretty sour about it; when he teases her, he directly quotes a line from her ex-boyfriend about lying. Obviously, Sasha gets annoyed with this. Rhys, at least, has the capacity to feel shame, and he apologizes.

So Rhys isn't entirely an asshole. He's just mostly an asshole. Despite AI Jack's constant insistence that they're very, very much alike (which they are in some ways!), Rhys actually feels compassion for people other than himself. It might seem otherwise, but that's mostly because Rhys has had to survive in a dog-eat-dog corporate world. He makes selfish decisions, certainly, especially when they'll benefit him in a big way (see: Trusting Jack over Fiona). But when it comes to Rhys's friends, he'll do a hell of a lot for them. It's not immediately obvious early on in the game, but he definitely opens up to people other than Vaughn the more he hangs out with Fiona and Sasha. Sure, Rhys is a major butthead, but he has a huge capacity to care. For example, when he and Sasha are split from the group during their time in the Dome, a part of the catwalk they're on starts to fall apart. Sasha is dangerously close to falling, and Rhys refuses to let her drop down without exhausting all options. Even when someone's crossed him, after he lightens up a hell of a lot, he's determined to save their life. (Specifically, Yvette double-crosses him so she can get to the top. While "Rhys before going to Pandora" would have snubbed her, "Rhys after hanging out with con artists with hearts of gold" instead chooses to save her from dying.) As much of a butthead as he is to his friends, when it comes to serious conversations, Rhys absolutely is there to have them. When Vaughn is self-conscious about not only himself but their friendship, Rhys reassures him that there's no way he's not going to be Vaughn's best bro for a hell of a long time. He's a dummy, but he's not entirely dense when it comes down to it. And when Jack takes over Rhys's body when Rhys falls unconscious from a long fall, and subsequently hits on Fiona and slaps Sasha's ass, Rhys apologizes for his behavior. (He just doesn't tell her it was Jack controlling his body. He's not that dumb.)

In addition, he's pretty damn courageous. Even if it's for a sketchy reason, Rhys's going down to Pandora (a planet infamous for being a home to murderous bandits and worse) is pretty brave. He doesn't really know how to handle a gun that's not imaginary and actually his hand, he's never had to fight, and he trips over his words often when he's trying to play it cool. Further on in the story, though, Rhys genuinely becomes courageous. He straight-up risks his neck in order to catch the assembled Gortys-ball from falling off a very, very high ledge. He tells Loader Bot to save itself when he and Vaughn are being shot at by bandits, even if it means that they might die. He attempts to recover the briefcase full of ten million dollars during a death race, even when surrounded by a lot of Psychos. He's even willing to risk his life to keep Sasha from falling to her death. Hell, when he has his falling out with Jack, he goes to great lengths to destroy Jack from within: Specifically, he literally throws himself onto the core of Helios and jabs an electric baton into its power, almost getting vented into space as a result.

Funnily enough, though, Rhys has a very weak stomach. Pandora is honestly a pretty gross planet--it's got Psychos who scream about crotch machines (motorcycles) and meat bicycles (probably people), and have skin pizza parties (where they literally carve off a corpse's face and put it on... their masks...), as well as all the awesome monsters. Rhys very, very nearly loses his lunch when he has to intrude on sleeping Psychos' skin pizza party in order to recover Hugo Vasquez's face, which he needs in order to get a Hugo Vasquise to infiltrate Helios successfully. It's all understandable, really, since Rhys has never had to deal with the literal gory details. Fiona and Sasha, however, disagree, and in the Borderlands universe, having a queasy tummy is detrimental. But on a moral level, Rhys has a weak stomach when it comes to Jack's ultimate plan: To upload his consciousness into exoskeleton bots and make a million Handsome Jacks. This is when Rhys decides enough is enough--he puts an end to his and Jack's alliance. In the end, Rhys doesn't have what it takes to be the next Handsome... and that is one hundred percent forgivable. It's almost noble, even; Rhys might take a lot of lives, but in the end, they weigh on his consciousness. Where Jack feels no remorse for killing a lot of people, when Rhys is responsible for the fall of Helios and the subsequent deaths of thousands of people, it stays with him.

Rhys is shockingly resilient, too, not just emotionally (bearing the weight of all of those deaths and the things he's done) but physically. He survives countless falls and more head trauma than a normal person can endure, and while he's made fun of for it, he soldiers on. Of course, he never passes up a chance to complain about it, but that's completely understandable. At one point he even insinuates that he's in so much pain that he wants to die. Hell, most people shouldn't be able to survive Handsome Jack strangling them with their own robot arm, but Rhys persists. Somehow. He's also really good at running away from things that'll kill him. There's a sense of self-preservation there, too; if he knows his friends are safe, then yeah, he'll definitely run away from a confrontation that might kill him. While Rhys won't be coming from a canon point that follows this, it's worth noting that Rhys, in a desperate attempt to get rid of Jack once and for all, literally rips his robot arm out of its socket, gushing blood in the process; he carves his port out of his head; he yanks his ECHO eye implant out of his eyeball. Rhys can take a lot of pain, and it's only after he yanks the implant out of his eye that he finally passes out from pain. Also, he survives a hell of a fall from Helios to Pandora. Even if it's in an escape pod that's designed to be extra-sturdy, he still has a noticeable limp and struggles to walk. (Honestly, Rhys should have died several times in the game.) Physically, though, he's weak otherwise. At one point, Sasha takes down a Hyperion soldier easily, and when Rhys tries the same thing, he fails miserably. Smooth.

Speaking of failing miserably, Rhys has a habit of saying stupid stuff. It's kind of a running joke, honestly; Rhys puts his foot in his mouth constantly, but he at least feels embarrassed whenever people call him out. There's even a scene where Rhys very nearly tells Athena--who hates Jack--that Jack's hanging out in his head. Jack ends up slapping Rhys with his own roboarm in order to get him to shut up, because Rhys honestly doesn't know when to shut up sometimes. When he thinks he's winning, he gets smug as hell about it, and he ends up looking like a complete moron. At the same time, Rhys gets flustered and starstruck when he's around people he admires; he's honestly downright adorable whenever he interacts with the Vault Hunter Zer0, who he says is "really cool." Because he does get flustered around people he admires, this results in Rhys being pretty weak to praise. Jack feeds off of this--he praises Rhys constantly to butter him up by telling him how similar they are, how great Rhys is at doing stuff... and it works. It makes Rhys's head pretty big, and he starts to agree with Jack. Which... is one of the reasons he accepts Hyperion easily. Jack tells him he deserves it, and Jack is his idol, so Rhys genuinely starts to believe Jack. (Which is pretty dangerous, when you think about it; had Jack not told Rhys he planned to bodyjack him, and kept telling Rhys stuff he wanted to hear and felt good about, Rhys might've done some seriously sketchy stuff. It's a good thing Rhys has actual morals!)

Rhys is a pretty quick thinker, though. The nature of his "adventure" requires him to think and plan on the fly, just because of how much can and does go wrong. After all, Rhys's plan to screw over Vasquez is formulated pretty quickly; not even an hour later (probably, time isn't clear in Tales) after the disastrous meeting with Vasquez, Rhys and Vaughn land on Pandora. While some of Rhys's plans don't come to fruition, the fact that he comes up with them so quickly and can think through possible issues is downright impressive. However, while Fiona and Sasha dismiss some of his plans as ridiculous, his plan to go up to Helios and grab Gortys's last part is so well thought out that even they, con-artists, are impressed. And while the Helios mission ultimately ends up a catastrophe in nearly every way, they manage to follow it well enough... and they do recover Gortys's last piece. Still, it's a measure of how much they trust Rhys's plan-making that they go to him when they hit bumps. Then again, he's the one who knows Helios best. Still, Rhys is damn resourceful, and he's more than capable of thinking outside the box. (It's his idea to create a Hugo Vasquise, after all.) There's some creativity at play here, too, since Rhys can come up with pretty elaborate plans! ... He's also a hell of a story-teller, even with ridiculous exaggeration. Also of note is how level-headed Rhys is during the Helios mission and even beforehand; he might get annoyed, but when it really truly matters, he knows how to play it cool and keep his cool. Even when trying to hack into Helios, he keeps a level head and directs Fiona and Sasha, kind of like an actual leader should.

But while Rhys is a good planner, he also makes exceedingly questionable decisions. Specifically, the decision to trust Jack actively upsets Fiona when she learns about it much later. Rhys knows it was a bad decision, but at the time, when given the choice between his hero and a con-artist he's not known for very long, he chooses his hero. Rhys is essentially blinded by his idolization--which borders on obsession, really--and doesn't realize it until it's too late. It's not until Jack threatens to make more Handsome Jacks that Rhys gets a grip and rejects Jack. By this point, though, Rhys has accepted Hyperion and risks ruining his friendship with the girls; it's very likely he doesn't even realize that, which is possibly even worse. While Rhys definitely improves as a person, he falls back into that habit of making bad decisions when his dream is within his grasp. Arguably, the tide of bad decisions actually starts when Rhys decides to screw Vasquez over. He's again blinded, but by ambition and petty payback that he nearly dies. And it's certainly a bad idea when he shoves Nakayama's ID drive into his head in order to get the resources he needs... for petty payback against Vasquez.

At the time, though, they seem like really good decisions. Honest.
CANON POWERS: Rhys is just a normal human, but he is a talented hacker. His resilience could also be seen as a power because holy shit, he can get whacked in the head a thousand times and still keep going.
OTHER: Rhys has a prosthetic! That's about it.


CRAU INFO: N/A
MAGIC ABILITY: FINGERGUNS: Rhys will be able to fire magic bullets from his fingertips. They will act as normal bullets. However, if he fires too many at once, Rhys will suffer damage to his fingertips. "Too many" is probably around seven to ten, so essentially, no burst fire is happening here. Rhys will be able to fire a round of twenty bullets before he needs a cooldown period, akin to a reloading time. He'll need five minutes in between "reloads" before he can fire off more.
ANY WEAPONS/MAGICAL ITEMS?: An electro-rod; this is basically a stick that's electrified.
ANY PETS?: Dumpy! He's a robot that flies and screams. He has no powers, other than bursting someone's eardrums with his screeches.


LINKED SAMPLE: Rhys on the TDM.