el nysa application

[willrevile]

THE CHARACTER

Character Name: James Tiberius (Jim) Kirk
Series: Star Trek AOS
Canon Point: post-Star Trek Boldly Go #6 (a couple months after the end of the film Star Trek Beyond)
Character Age: 31
Background: Wiki link! That website classifies everything from the Alternate Original Series as The Original Series because it's an AU of TOS, but the information there is all still AOS, the links are just categorized weirdly.

Personality:

James Tiberius Kirk is a hard-won complete picture; he's a perpetual work-in-progress but always working; he's an angry daredevil with a chip on his shoulder and he's a level-headed strategist wholly devoted to the dream of universal peace. Everyone has a push-and-pull in them, good points and bad, and Jim is no different. He was an unsure kid that turned into a frustrated thrill-seeker, all ego and backtalk and getting away with the most ridiculous shit thanks to sheer nerve. As a thirty-one year old, Jim's personality has finally begun to even out after the rollercoaster of his life – his serious faults hammered into awkward dents instead of threatening spikes, and his childish pitfalls being at least halfway filled in by the forced maturation following tragedy and the inevitable progression of time.

Considered a playboy by some and an embarrassing flirt by others, Jim dedicated a lot of years to screwing around-- as well as being drunk, getting into trouble with the law and otherwise – poorly behaved, overall, and it was so ingrained in him that even his first years at the militarized Starfleet Academy couldn't grind the wandering eyes or the rebellious streak out. His stubborn refusal to buckle to authority turned out to be a boon during one galactic crisis, but later backfired, leaving him open to manipulation. Jim is someone who has to learn things the proverbial hard way, because his uncanny ability to make shit happen often enables him to bypass consequences. He was still rolling in late and without a care to professional meetings due to wild hookups and flouting regulation all the way up to the day he got his command yanked from him – something that wasn't reversed until the murder of his father figure, making the return painful instead of a relief. Jim struggled to reconcile that, his own place in Starfleet, as well as trying to balance his inherent explosive nature with the painful lessons he'd learned. He managed it by leaning on what he'd come to believe in: the United Federation of Planets and its principles of universal liberty, peaceful cooperation, and scientific advancement.

It may sound corny, but it is what it is: Jim grew up. He's no longer a 22 year old getting into bar fights – he's, you know, a 31 year old getting into bar fights. Limited ones, for good reasons. Crashing spaceships into planets instead of driving cars off cliffs! Jim has a very playful and optimistic exterior, and it's an honest exterior: he likes people, he likes approaching things positively, and he'd be very happy to maintain that tone with complete honesty. His smile can hide how watchful he is, though: having grown up in an abusive household, Jim is anything but naïve about the way people can be. He is street smart and observant, often jaded – though hopeful. Because Jim wants to be the positive person who only sees the good in the world, that's what he strives for. He could have easily fallen into bitterness, but instead he became an officer in Starfleet and bought into the ideals of the Federation wholesale - so much that he's willing to die for them, believing in theme even when he doesn't particularly believe in himself, knowing that if they're powerful enough to turn him into a better person, that they can touch anyone.

Jim can have a temper, and he can be reckless. Sometimes those things can be justified: he's capable of being extremely calculating, especially about his own limits, and combined with his tactical mind, sometimes when he throws himself into a dangerous situation, it's because he's completely sure he'll be able to make it work. Other times, though, he's doing it because it was impulsive and he didn't think it through, or because he was angry. His tendency to react first and consider later is definitely his biggest weakness, occasionally unable to be patient, especially in tense situations. Jim feels crippled by inaction, and though he's come a long way learning patience, he still struggles with it.

Some of that unstoppable gogogo! mindset is because his formative years linked staying in one place with vulnerability, but it's also because he's a Starfleet captain. Jim sees his job as less of a boss and more of a cheerleader with authority. He's constantly pointing out that his own actions rarely save the day or solve the problem - it's his crew, he was just the one shoving everybody into place, urging them to trust their instincts, and dragging everyone to work together. Jim is very good at seeing the big picture and identifying who needs to be where to make something happen, and he's always trying to make something happen. His job is insane. Deep space exploration means running into literally anything, from hostile enemies to portals to other dimensions to inexplicable frequencies that cause people to turn into plants to giant brain-eating space jellyfish to relics from old Earth that have evolved into unrecognizable creatures and so on and so forth. Jim has to be at 100% at all times, and even if he is angry or scared about something, he can't let it get in the way of doing his job, because freezing could end up costing his whole crew their lives. So he just goes, as momentum is better than stagnation. His habit of going “What?” or interrupting a subordinate mid-technobabble (see: Spock, Scotty) is rarely a product of genuine confusion, and mostly a technique to facilitate progression (having initially been employed in his youth, to make people underestimate his intelligence). Another habit, going on away missions and seeing to unknown and potentially dangerous situations instead of staying on the bridge to supervise as is considered standard operating procedure for captains, is also linked to his need for momentum. There are other motivations behind that practice, too, such as being unwilling to order any crew member into a situation he himself would not face, and learning the job on the job. He was, after all, promoted directly to captain from having been a cadet. Jim is self-aware of his own inexperience (or he was, in his lesser experienced years), and takes steps to fill in the gaps.

He's filled in the gaps pretty well over the years, having gone through the ups and downs of being a young heroic prodigy to a reckless liability to one of the most respected officers in the 'Fleet. Jim has a natural, down-to-earth charisma that lends to his position of command, with his own honest, loyal spirit inspiring loyalty in others. He is determined, hardworking, and very brave. Kind of a goofball and still a bit of a flirt (or a lot of a flirt, given opportunity), Jim has grown to balance his professional and personal lives with something like ease, if not actual grace – grace might be pushing it for James T Kirk, at least in this timeline.

We change. We have to. Or we spend the rest of our lives fighting the same battles.
- Jim Kirk, Star Trek Beyond

Powers/Abilities: Jim is a baseline human with no supernatural powers, but he's good at some stuff!

• A Formidable Opponent: Jim is an expert hand-to-hand combatant, having grown up getting into fights constantly and later being trained professionally at Starfleet Academy (even having become the assistant instructor in Advanced H2H while still a student); what he lacks in Batman-ninja grace he makes up for in his capacity to get up after being kicked in the face repeatedly. He's also a crack shot with firearms and a better-than-average pilot.
  
• Brain Works Pretty Good: Considered a “genius”, Jim has become a tactical prodigy in his career, and has a broad aptitude for sciences and languages (he was an officer in the Academy's xenolinguistics club, and had his pick of majors, ultimately choosing the command track over engineering). He also has an incredible, though not eidetic, memory.
  
• Special Snowflake: Jim has had a boatload of weird stuff happen to him, chief among them an abrupt, heavy info-dump mind meld with Spock Prime that left him with an avalanche of memories and feelings that aren't his. While mostly dormant, he can occasionally look into those memories, or mistake flashes of them as his own, though both are extremely rare. It's also left him capable of performing a successful Vulcan nerve pinch – something that's very rare for a human but not impossible (his own counterpart, Kirk Prime, was never able to learn despite many attempts at teaching him, though Michael Burnham of Star Trek: Discovery can do it, for an example in each direction).

Power Nerfs (if applicable): N/A

Inventory:

• Starfleet uniform/outfit/dog tags
  
• A jacket
  
• Starfleet communicator
  
• Weapon Request: Starfleet issue type 2 phaser (23rd century) - a 'laser' pistol with an adjustable power setting (from yee olde 'stun' up to being able to slice through bulkheads)

Incentives: The safety of his crew would be enough. Jim is a hero-type in a leadership position who comes from a post-scarcity socialist society, and so he wouldn't need to be bribed or bargained with a whole lot to ensure his cooperation, despite probable personal wariness. As a Starfleet captain and representative of the Federation he'd probably actually feel obligated to agree to help, or at least take a crack at it.

SAMPLES

TDM top level from Nov 2017 has starters, but since all the threads are text I also have:
1 & 2 from the Jan 2018 TDM.