The Player
Name/nickname: Lia
Age: 26
Pronouns: female
Contact: liaparisi@gmail.com, AIM: ohliamylia (preferred)
Experience: Just shy of seven years of text-based RP at dear_multiverse, secretsinspaace, and brb_gallifrey (LJ), and bigapplesauce (DW). 15+ years of chat-based RP, with groups and individuals.
The Character
Name: Ianto Jones
Alias: n/a
Age/Birthdate: 8/19/1983
Species: Human
Canon: Torchwood (canon + post-death AU)
Canon point: extremely post-Children of Earth
Abilities: Ianto's proximity to his own Rift in Cardiff has aggravated some latent skills, such as low-level psychic and cognitive empathic abilities. This gives him a heightened sense of the present and his surroundings, and a conscious/subconscious knowledge of people's emotions, intentions, wants/needs, et cetera. He had mandatory psychic training at Torchwood One, providing him with an adequate amount of shielding. Also through Torchwood, he had extensive weapons training, including hand guns, big ass guns, stun guns, and other ranged weapons. He fancies himself James Bond, but he is not great at melee combat. Better than the average human though. He also has some experience with complicated computer systems and is proficient at 'hacking'. Once their technological expert at Torchwood died he sort of became the temporary one. He's also familiar with machine repair/construction/conversion (see: when he somehow turned a cyberconversion unit into a life support device). He has eidetic memory, though it can be interfered with, via drugs, alcohol, psychic influence, brain damage, and so on. For the most part, though, he remembers everything, which is a bad in combination with his all-but-diagnosed PTSD (he has, in the past, admitted to having trouble getting past many and various traumatic experiences, and wishes he could stop thinking about them all the time). Foremost, he an excellent liar, which manifests in many ways, like his speech, dress, actions. I refer to him as a social chameleon. He adapts himself to blend into any given situation.
(For post-bigapplesauce version:) His proximity to the bigapplesauce rift combined with his travel through it has aggravated
other latent abilities, such as his ability to assimilate himself. He is exceptionally good at becoming a face in the crowd and ingratiating himself to other people. He was good at that before, but on Earth, with humans - now he's good at it with aliens too. Let's say he has high charisma and the bluff skill.
Appearance: Tall (6'), the thinner side of average, the dressier side of casual. These days he's moved on from three-piece suits to jumpers, pressed trousers, that sort of thing, but he will often return to suits and suit pieces when things are stressful. Suits are like his armor. When he isn't being dressy, or even when he is, he tends toward the practical and useful. He has short brown hair, which is always very 'carefully arranged'. Light blue eyes. He very rarely wears anything that isn't long-sleeved (or long... trousered) due to an impressive number of scars collected during his time with Torchwoods One and Three. Quiet. Prefers to blend into the background and observe rather than be observed. Tends to keep quirks to a minimum so as to remain unobtrusive. Generally acts rather polite and proper around people, though the better he knows you, the more relaxed he'll be. Also suffers alternatively from cases of resting sad face when nothing bad is happening and resting bitch face when something is up.
HE'S WELSH AND FROM WALES AND HAS A WELSH ACCENT which may be unintelligible to some at first. Occasionally exaggerated for shits and giggles, often downplayed for aforementioned social chameleon-ness. I just realized I didn't mention this anywhere and maybe it's relevant to someone. Actually, it does tend to change somewhat depending on who he's with. He started at Torchwood Three with a very strong Welsh accent that gradually became less intense over time, possibly due to Jack's overbearing American-ness. It depends on who he's talking to, really.
Personality: Too bright for his own good. Loyal primarily to what he believes is right and to others who are fighting toward the same cause. Ianto has a sarcastic streak a mile wide, especially in the face of danger (unless it's in the face of absolute certain death, and then he gives up and moans about how they're all going to die - and naturally they never do). He needs to be needed. He likes having a place in things, preferably a big one. Not like a leader, but like a "what would we do without you" sort of deal. He keeps to himself, emotionally and physically. Fears being useless, having no "point", forgetting or not knowing who he is - but also fears remembering too much, constantly haunted by the past he can never forget. He's also got a weird buried dark side to him that I don't even understand. So.
History: Ianto was born and grew up on the Gaer, an estate in Newport, South Wales, disappointed by his lot in life and embarrassed by his family. His mother had unspecific mental health issues (I've played it as dementia or Alzheimer's, though for all we know it maybe have been something alien that happened to her). His father worked in menswear of a department store. He got along with his older sister, Rhiannon, until they drifted apart due to their father's physical and emotional abuse, which, if not entirely focused on Ianto, was never focused on Rhiannon, at least. Ianto's father drank too much and 'pushed too hard' for Ianto to be the son he wanted him to be and criticized him heavily and often, which escalated to physical abuse. Ianto played pretend a lot to escape reality: action/adventure stuff, James Bond, etc. This is where his tendency to embellish the truth and slide into different personalities comes from. I imagine in his early teenage years, his mother passed due to complications from her unspecified illness. With nothing to keep him good, he started acting out as a teenager - anything to distance himself from his dad and his childhood. One minor conviction for shoplifting in his teens, but who's to say there was more he wasn't caught doing. Like going to sweet underground raves. (Actually a thing he did.)
His father passed when he was at the later end of his teens due to liver failure and with nothing to keep him home, Ianto went to university. I don't know what happened here, but it did not go well, and he never finished. I think he went in undecided and uncommitted and just didn't care or try enough. Whether he left or was kicked out, he went on to a series of temp jobs and generally being a drifter. Somewhere in here, and for some reason, he was recruited into Torchwood One. I like to think he met Lisa, a Torchwood One employee, in a coffee shop, and she put in a good word for them after they got to know each other. He worked at One as a Junior Research Assistant and entered a romantic relationship with Lisa. When Torchwood One fell to the Cybermen and Daleks, Ianto rescued Lisa from being converted and somehow squirreled her off to some unspecific location along with a cyberconversion unit to help her 'recover' from being a Cyberman. Yeah. I think this is where his real love of coffee came from, as he tried to cling to a happier time/pretend everything was normal and recreate their coffee dates from the very beginning of their relationship. He worried about leaving her at home, though, so he started making the coffee at home. And then he needed something to obsess about for a measure of control, so he obsessed about coffee.
He wormed his way into Jack Harkness' good graces with the help of a studded belt, some homoerotic tussling on a warehouse floor, and a pteranodon that came through the Rift. Once he secured a job at Torchwood Three, he somehow snuck Lisa into the basement and wired her up to the main power supply. He worked there for a while as general help, pandering to and flirting with Jack as much as possible to keep him distracted. This did not end well. After Lisa escaped and killed a couple of people on her mission to convert the world, she was killed, and somewhere in there Ianto was too. Jack kissed him back to life. I am not making this up. Not long after this, Ianto and Jack entered a sexual and one-sidedly romantic relationship, and bare in mind Jack nearly executed him several times after finding out about Lisa. So that was a super healthy relationship.
During his service with Torchwood Three, Ianto was endangered, injured, traumatized, and fondled in back rooms. He traveled to space. He grew close with his teammates. The world nearly ended numerous times. Jack left and came back, giving new pseudo-romanticism to his relationship with Ianto, but when Ianto pressed to make it official and call themselves a couple, Jack retreated. Then the Hub was blown up. A day or three later, Ianto went to confront an alien race that wanted to take ten percent of the world's children. Jack felt that there was nothing they could do and that they had no choice, but Ianto was and is always of the opinion that there is always something to be done, and you can always fight, and you always have a choice. He and Jack went to confront the alien and possibly try to reason with it, armed with nothing but handguns. This did not end well. Jack and Ianto died in defense of the Earth when the alien representative released a poison into the air of the building. Jack, who is immortal, came back to life. Ianto did not.
BRBG/APPLESAUCE AU BEGINS HERE, SEE BELOW FOR CANON COMPLIANT/COMMON_GROUND AU
Although. In early 2009, by Ianto's reckoning, he found himself a part of an online community (brb_gallifrey) that seemed to attract many friends and enemies of the Doctor, as well as the Doctor himself, several times over. He was forcibly brought to numerous gatherings of these people (which he would hesitate to call 'parties') and made fast friends with the eighth incarnation of the Doctor. This friendship continued for many months, after which the Doctor 'accidentally' found out about Ianto's death and, as is the way with Eight, refused to accept it. He bodynapped Ianto's corpse, god knows where from, and
had the TARDIS revive him, not unlike how she revived past companions of his. Ianto and the Doctor traveled together while Ianto got over the whole death thing (though he never really has, to be honest). During this time, Ianto had his first encounter with
Zagreus, who pulled a neat trick with Ianto's mind and royally fucked it up. The Doctor (though the fifth one, this time) put Ianto's mind back in order, and Ianto learned absolutely nothing from this experience. Through that general catastrophe, he met Fitz Kreiner. He did not like Fitz. Fitz began traveling with them (or rather, started traveling with the Doctor again), and they slowly, reluctantly became friends, thanks in part to forced co-habitation during a vacation to Edwardian New Orleans after Ianto accidentally poisoned the Doctor with aspirin, the Doctor fobwatched himself to get it out of his system safely, and Fitz misplaced the fobwatch. (They did end up finding it.)
Ianto averted the (attempted) destruction of Zagreus by the TARDIS, because he's an idiot who believes in second chances. Fresh off the experience of the fobwatched Doctor, Ianto suggested this instead. Somewhere in here, he struck up a relationship with Fitz, which was put on hold when Zagreus was fobwatched and fobbed off into the German countryside in the far future. Ianto looked after the resulting human (and later the tenth Doctor's TARDIS (who has a body now, did I mention) recovering from the tenth Doctor's explosive regeneration). He made one or two visits 'home' to Fitz and the Doctor, reinforcing his relationship with Fitz, although he began to feel torn between the two worlds - he enjoyed the excitement of traveling with the Doctor, but he also enjoyed the reliability and relative normalcy of his life in Germany. The choice was made for him when, inevitably, the fobwatching failed, as antitime was never meant to be contained like that. Zagreus got his groove back, and the TARDIS and Ianto escaped. He returned to life with Fitz and the Doctor, but unbeknownst to him, Zagreus had already gotten to Fitz (time travel!) and manipulated his mind. Fitz conspired to get rid of Ianto (to pave the way for getting rid of the Doctor), sabotaging his relationship with Ianto and souring the relationship between the Doctor and Ianto. Feeling that he had no place in Team TARDIS anymore, Ianto asked to be returned to the house in Germany at Fitz's suggestion, with a good few weeks buffer for Zagreus to clear out.
Also unbeknownst to him (but absolutely known to Fitz), Zagreus was still there, waiting to exact his revenge on Ianto for the fobwatching, which for some strange reason he did not see as a kindness. For a couple of weeks, Zagreus painstakingly took Ianto's mind apart, then skipped out. Fitz, now free of Zagreus' influence, and the Doctor, having learned Fitz's plan, returned to Germany to get Ianto back. What they found huddled in the house was not Ianto, and Eight, as he does, refused to accept this. Twice he brute forced attempts to put Ianto's mind back together, despite Ianto begging him not to once he could speak, doing arguably more damage than Zagreus did in the first place. Blaming the Doctor for this (and Fitz for failing to stop him), Ianto refused to return with them, and instead returned to what was now the eleventh Doctor's TARDIS, who he considered a friend. He spent nearly a year recovering with her, keeping very much to himself in the back rooms while season six was going on. When he had sufficiently recovered, Ianto, who held (and still holds) a very deep-seated resentment toward the Doctor, decided he'd had enough of everything in any way related to the Doctor and went and got a house somewhere very quiet in northern England. Up until he was stolen by another rift and brought to a new universe, he worked at a museum and dated a lovely girl and had a normal life that was really very nice.
Shortly after arriving in the Manhattan of this new, different universe, he discovered that
the TARDIS from his universe had been brought there as well, and was relieved to have a friend. Unfortunately, the Zagreus from his universe was there too, but they'd entered an unspoken, uneasy truce, as they both realized that they had dirt on each other. Essentially. During the weeks in Germany when Ianto was tortured, Zagreus gazed into the abyss (of Ianto's mind) and it gazed right back, to the point where they knew dark secrets about the other. Each unwilling to have these secrets revealed, they avoided each other for the most part, and were oddly civil when they did interact.
Decidedly displeased by being trapped in another universe, Ianto used his knowledge and his position at a Torchwood-esque institute to build a rudimentary rift manipulator in an attempt to send himself home. It did not work, and the resulting explosion left him in a coma for four months. During this time, his mind wandered a place called the Dreaming, where he was able to interact with the dreaming minds of others who had been brought through the rift and trapped in that universe. He kept himself moderately sane by doing this.
He eventually awoke from the coma, weakened and despondent, having given up on ever returning home. He spent the rest of his time in Manhattan recovering from his time in the coma, physically and mentally. Due to the metaphysical circumstances of the coma, it was not as debilitating as, say, an actual four-month coma would be, though he still needs a cane to walk. His memory is not the same as it once was, due to both the coma and the interference of Zagreus and the Doctor within his mind, but that too is slowly recovering. He may not ever be able to clearly remember his rift manipulator experiment, or his time in Germany, but he will have photographic memories of new things.
Ianto was pulled from that universe and returned not to his own universe, but to another, third universe: that of the
the Twelfth Doctor who had also been trapped with him. They were joined by
Calliope, who at this point they are basically two gay dads to. The TARDIS returned back to their own universe to be reunited with their own Doctor.
CANON COMPLIANT:
Six months after his death, Ianto was (spoilers!) briefly resurrected, in a sense, within the House of the Dead, Cardiff's most haunted pub. He was brought back through a psychic's intervention with a powerful, evil force named Syriath, and by the subconscious wish of Jack, who was there to stop Syriath from coming through the rift and killing everyone. Ianto was able to make contact with his dead father, which upset him greatly. His father pointed out that they had both betrayed their loved ones, hinting at the past abuse. Jack intended to annihilate himself in an explosion designed to take out Syriath and close the Cardiff Rift forever. As an immortal, he wouldn't die, but would be trapped forever in the space between worlds. Ianto tricked Jack into leaving the pub as it was falling into the Rift and detonated the bomb alone, destroying himself in the process. He and Jack were able to say a proper goodbye before Ianto was killed again.
COMMON_GROUND AU:
As it was Ianto who blew up the bomb, he is the one trapped in the space between worlds, and for some reason, there's a coffee shop there.
Writing Sample:
Ianto leaves the TARDIS. Anything else? It started as in-jokes about how he gained weight over the course of the seasons, but he really likes pie. He also fucking loves Mars, and in the brbg/applesauce AU, totally went there, and it was awesome.
He's really unattractive when he cries.
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