![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Subnautica Application
OOC INFORMATION
NAME: Call me Golden!
AGE: 24 (Definitely over 18, pfft.)
PREFERRED CONTACT: I have a Plurk and a Skype! I basically never use the Plurk now, though, so you're better off with the Skype. PM me here if you want to have it!
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
IC INFORMATION
NAME: Hamato Donatello (Don, Donny, Donnie, various semi-insulting names that mock how intelligent he is)
AGE: He's probably barely eighteen, or at least very close to it.
CANON: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - 2003 era!
CANON POINT: The first episode of Season 6, right after that time jump.
CANON INFORMATION: This has a rough breakdown of the canon, but it's pretty patchy. If the mods need more information, I'll be happy to add it! (The parts of the timeline that are the most relevant are pre-2006.)
PERSONALITY:
"I've just got to know what makes it tick."
Donatello is, as his show's theme song puts it, "the brains of the bunch", but saying that is only brushing the surface. Sure, it's probably his most obvious trait - anyone who talks to him for more than a few minutes is probably going to hear some variant of technobabble from this frighteningly intelligent Turtle - but it's only one part of who he is, and that's something he occasionally wishes other people would acknowledge a little better.
It's hard to understand Donatello without considering his brothers and his sensei, Master Splinter. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their adoptive father have grown up in close quarters with each other, being literally the only examples of their species on their entire planet. Faced with a world that they believe will never understand, they have had to come to rely on each other in a way that few families have experienced. The intense co-dependency created by this situation is something that has shaped Donatello since he was a child.
The training that Master Splinter provided his children with to protect them, known as ninjutsu, focuses on the way of stealth and camouflage, and comes with specific styles of weaponry (in the case of Donatello, his specialty is the bo staff). Learned from his own Master Yoshi while Splinter was still an un-mutated rat, he took it upon himself to ensure that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could hold their own on the tough, gritty streets of New York City, U.S. Living in the sewers, the Turtles were able to see with their own eyes the dark underbelly of the city: criminal elements such as the Purple Dragons run rampant, homelessness is everywhere, and major factions control politics, economics and power with sleazy backroom deals.
Growing up in a world like this means that all of the Ninja Turtles are used to a life of paranoid secrecy. Though this has kind of loosened in their recent years, to the point of their little family expanding to include humans, aliens and all sorts of misfits from across the multiverse, the Turtles are still slow to trust and quick to defend. The training that Splinter has given them since they were toddlers has ensured that each of the Turtles have been shaped into seasoned, dedicated warriors - albeit with echoes of the young people that they still are occasionally surfacing (despite Master Splinter's best efforts, sometimes).
Unlike his brothers, though, Don has always wanted to make things. Even early in his life, he was already a tinkerer, learning to take apart and put together all sorts of junked gadgets. This is one of his main duties in the household today: as the Mr. Fix-It of both bodies and machinery, he prides himself on his technological expertise and his anatomical knowledge: both of these have saved his family countless times, and have elevated their standard of living from "literally hunkering down in a sewer" to "hey we have electricity and cable".
His intelligence doesn't stop at engineering. As a sort of Renaissance Man (or Turtle), this polymath has some of everything: he's got a decent grasp of several languages and was able to muddle his way through literal alien texts enough to fly a spacecraft in only a few hours, he's well-read in subjects as variable as history and mathematics to classic literature, and he knows his way around a computer mainframe as well as the sewers of New York. His focusing is nearly-legendary, and his determination to understand things or finish products borders on the ridiculous.
In fact, it's been so ridiculous, it's been a clear detriment. Donatello occasionally lapses into bouts of thought so intense that he literally ceases to acknowledge anything else (which is terrible when you are a ninja). This has happened mid-fight more times than any of the other Turtles would care for. With such an ironclad focus, it's sometimes difficult to drag this particular dreamer back down to Earth, or whatever planet he happens to have his mind in. He's also worked himself to the shell, forgoing sleep and food and sometimes sanity to desperately throw himself at projects that may never come to fruition.
Donatello's dreamer nature is a problem in other ways. He believes that people are generally rational and good, despite his worldviews taking all kinds of beatings from generally-terrible individuals, and labours to try to understand everyone (even when it would be a lot better to just give up and fight). He's easily the weakest of his brothers, barely putting up a fight in the Battle Nexus tournament. To be fair, he was strong enough to get through the preliminaries, so this doesn't mean he's a complete pushover, but next to his more-disciplined or skilled siblings, Donatello's brawn leaves something to be desired. In situations where he can't just think his way out, he tends to lock up, reduced to frustrated exclamations.
As the most intellectual Turtle, Don usually relies the most on logic and reason, shoving his emotions aside. This doesn't mean he doesn't have them: he is excellent at being passive-aggressive. He just doesn't want to acknowledge them outright, and sometimes goes out of his way to conceal them under the guise of work. While this ability to compartmentalize his feelings makes him excellent at defusing conflicts, it means he's pretty terrible at being straightforward about what he wants, and he'll happily continue to let himself be subsumed by whatever problem is happening until somebody picks up on his internal conflicts.
Boy, does Don have internal conflicts. He may not agonize over situations as much as Leonardo or get as lost in his own emotions as Raphael or experience the same level of paranoia as Michelangelo, but he is excellent at over-analyzing everything. Donatello cannot let go of the idea of trying to understand things even if they remain stubbornly unknowable. He's probably psychoanalyzed himself a million times and even then still isn't entirely satisfied with the answers he's come up with. He has all these fundamental questions about himself - Who am I, really? Why is my family here? - and no real answers for any of them. The few times he butts up against things he can't grasp, such as the mystic energies of the Ninja Tribunal, he's showed irritation and discontent. He wants to know things, and sometimes the universe conspires to ensure he can't.
However, he knows his family loves him, and will support him as much as he supports them - and sometimes that's enough.
Recent events in Donatello's life have strengthened his love for his family and his conviction that they care for him despite his more solitary tendencies. The events of Same as it Never Was showed just how important he was to the sanity and comfort of his brothers, and that he isn't merely a tool or a doctor that fixes their broken situations; the Good Genes arc proved that their resilience and resourcefulness could come through even when he was not there himself to coordinate it. With these important insights into his place in his family life, Donatello's self-confidence has improved, and while he'll still do a lot of navel-gazing about his family on Iniidae, he won't be nearly as anxious about their safety without him now, especially since all of his major enemies in his timeline have been defeated (for now).
Being away from his family is going to be strange. However, Donatello will put his mind to any challenge placed in front of him. As one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he is used to his life being weird, exciting, dangerous - and always full of surprises.
ABILITIES:
- Brilliant techno-geek brain that works a mile a minute. Pretty much good at anything he can throw math at, which is a lot of things. Great at making connections even between seemingly-unrelated disciplines.
- Good at survivalism and general field medicine, though his knowledge is pretty Turtle-centric and URSULA's bots might render this less useful. Kind of used to eating crap; he's not picky.
- Knows a lot of machinery inside-out. He's adaptable and can learn to use vehicles and weaponry from alien cultures easily enough. He can also build a lot from garbage, though I defer to the mods on what he is allowed to salvage and how he is allowed to build with it.
- Physically agile and powerful; weapons-trained with several Japanese specialty weapons - primarily bo staff - and general ninjutsu. Eighteen years of study and training have kind of hammered out any obvious flaws in his technique.
- Is also a Turtle - a five foot tall talking turtle - so he's built like a tank. While he's less flexible than a comparable human, he makes up for that with a durable body. Don't be fooled though, that shell is alive and it will bleed if you cut it. More obvious useful abilities here: the guy can swim pretty damn well, and can hold his breath for at least ten minutes or so without consequence.
INVENTORY
- His clothes - simple belt, knee and elbow pads, wrist wraps... and that famous purple mask/headband combo.
- His trusty weapon and lowest-tech "gadget", his bo staff. It's... a fancy stick, basically, with a purple wrap around the middle for a grip.
- The duffel bag that Don carries just about everywhere. It seems to be made of canvas, with a single shoulder strap. Normally it's got a ton of stuff in it, but right now all it will contain is:
- A generic household toolkit -
- And a completely-inexplicable pigeon puppet.
MEMORY ALTERATION: Donatello basically remembers his brothers fighting over the television remote and then... bam, dimension jump. This would actually be completely accurate, except he's supposed to be where his brothers are, which obviously didn't occur. As this kind of thing has happened to Don before (such is the life of a Ninja Turtle) he won't actually be as worried about it as it sounds, at least until he figures out this is more permanent than last time. He'll also likely think that Iniidae has some connection with the Utroms or the Federation, and will probably be keeping an eye out for either of them. (Since the end of the Federation-Triceraton war, he'd be less bothered by the latter possibility, but he doesn't have the best memories of them. Might rub off on how he reacts to URSULA, at any rate.)
SAMPLE:
With the vast alien ocean all around him, Donatello figures he should be feeling something... deeper. Some instinct should be in his brain somewhere, compelling him to dive out into the shifting blueness all around the glass walls of the base. After all, he's a Turtle, and isn't that what Turtles are supposed to do?
Truth be told, though, he's not feeling it quite yet. What he's been distracted by is the lab.
Donatello has spent a few hours simply going over the contents of the base's laboratory, only occasionally interrupted by another person or by a drone flitting around the base. He's had some time to get over the fact he's in some strange alien world (though it hasn't stopped him from hiding in some shadowed corner whenever a human looked in. He doesn't trust this place quite yet), and basically being handed a guidebook on the place was irresistible.
The ninja's attention has been thoroughly engrossed by the local lifeforms. Everything about these alien fishes has been written in a language he understands, which doesn't escape his notice, but the fortuitousness of it all pales in comparison to the fascination he's experiencing. When he was on D'hoonib, he'd never gotten a chance to look at all the creatures there. Here, on the other hand, he's basically smack-dab in an aquarium, with a much smaller observation tank right in front of him.
"If only I had a Turtle Tracker or two," he remarks wistfully to himself, and partially to the bumblebee-like droid at his side. "I could maybe rig them up to interface with these scanners, and get some solid data on where these things go when they aren't in the Shallows." He turns away from the tank to look down at the droid, whose metal face is as uncomprehending as ever.
"Mikey'd probably call me crazy for wasting time on fish, even alien fish. I should be out there exploring, finding something..."
The Turtle's gaze turns out to the ocean again. In the face of its silence, he feels small and out of place. There are no city noises in this underwater laboratory: no subway, no echo in the sewer tunnels, no faraway sounds of shoes on the street. Just the empty void of an alien sea, pressing in on the walls.
He knows he's delaying doing anything more productive. This is partially because he doesn't know what would be productive. In the unusual alien worlds and timelines he's visited before, Donatello was dropped into the thick of things - stark immediacy and purpose had forced him to react. Here everything is slow and solemn, and utterly alien. He's not sure where to start.
Even though the only thing that can hear him is the tiny robot, he can't help but speak a little softer, as he places his fingers against the cold glass of the wall.
"It's just going to be weird. You know... swimming without my brothers."
The droid makes some faint clicking, loud against the ever-present silence, and Don sighs.
"Yeah... enough reminiscing for now. I know I can figure out something. Let's see, what was on URSULA's database again...? Maybe something about those wrecks that I can salvage..."
As Donatello turns his attention back to the console, the world around him fades away. He draws inward, inside himself, to the depths of his mind; a Turtle in his shell.
All around him, the ocean breathes. He will learn to breathe with it, someday soon. When he does, he feels deep in his chest that he will find his family again.
Revision/Addition: Don and Strangers
Still, there is evidence that Donatello's desire to understand and fix can bridge the gap between him and other people. One of the best examples of this is in the form of the genetically modified humans trapped in the Y'Lyntian underground city. Though these humans were strangers to him, Donatello was moved by their plight and resolved to rescue them. While his brothers accompanied him on the missions to Y'Lyntis, Donatello was the one who promised to save the humans trapped by needing the energy of the Crystal Moon; in the process, he made many friends, including a human named Sydney who had been one of the few remaining experiments that hadn't lost themselves entirely to their modifications.
Donatello may be a geek, but he's not completely lacking in social graces. While his brothers have done the majority of socializing for the family (with Michelangelo being the prominent one), Don tends to make the deeper intellectual connections. His most notable friendship is that of April O'Neil, a human woman and a computer scientist who the Turtles rescued from a robotic attack early in the series. Since then she's been a close friend of all of the Turtles, but Donatello has especially taken a liking to her quick wit and deep knowledge of mathematics. They're often collaborating together in episodes where they need the combined brainpower to get things done quickly. Donatello also talks to her of his own accord all the time (he's seen having an IM chat with her before Ultimate Drako shows up, for instance). He also has the closest relationship with a fellow mutant, the crocodile Leatherhead, who's also a scientist; it seems that Donatello gets along best with other intellectuals, as he has a more strained relationship with Casey Jones, the hotheaded vigilante friend of the Turtles. (He still clearly trusts Casey, though, and seems to appreciate him keeping Raphael from getting into too much trouble!)
Still, without his family to help smooth things over, Donatello is quicker to be defensive and mistrusting. Seeing Usagi Yojimbo trying to assist Leonardo while he was poisoned at the Battle Nexus got Don's hackles up. He had to be talked down from his defensiveness towards Usagi, though when the ronin proved himself trustworthy Don was willing to fight by his side. In absence of his family, Donatello might need more persuasion to come to trust people than he has in the past. Despite this, the unusual setting of Iniidae, and the knowledge that his family is safe elsewhere, should go some way towards easing the transition for Donatello.