for those unfamiliar with claire

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 07:12:30 GMT

NOTE: This app was written right after "Homecoming" first aired, so some information has been retconned or revealed since then that might not be mentioned in this app.

Name/Handle: Leora
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Timezone: EST
Email Address: stoptomnook@yahoo.com
Personal LJ username: roseisrain
AIM/other messenger screenname: IBrakeForAerith
Character you're applying for: Claire Bennet
Series the character is from: Heroes
Character's age: 17 (almost 18)
Character's gender: Female
Character’s “Real Name”: Jordan Sanders
How long have you roleplayed your character, if at all?: Never

Where have you roleplayed in general and/or with this specific character?: Gaiasphere as Kuja, Cross_Ani_Rpg and Botan and Hotaru, and now Zelos in Landel's.

Have you played the game/watched the movie or anime/read the book or comic, etc. that your character hails from?: Seen all the episodes thus far.

Please give us a detailed personal history of your character: Claire's true history is somewhat of a mystery, even (or especially?) to herself. Her true mother died when she was only three, and she was adopted by the Bennets, who were having trouble conceiving a child. She lived a normal childhood with her parents, and later on, her younger brother in Odessa Texas. She entered High School and became one of the most popular students due to her friendly nature and desire to please others by "being normal". Six months prior to the start of the show, she is given the position of cheerleader by her friend Jackie. However, Claire is put off by Jackie's mean nature and they argue over the uniform, until eventually Jackie pushes Claire into glass causing her to cut her hand. The wound is deep and she is sent to the emergency room, but when her father checks on the wound a few days later, it is fully healed. Claire is frightened by her powers at first, having strived so hard to be accepted and normal. She decides to call up her friend Zach, who videotapes several attempts Claire makes to injure and even kill herself. While Zach is amazed and excited by her powers, Claire remains upset and dry about the whole ordeal. However, upon seeing a fireman trapped in a burning building, she runs in to rescue him as Zach films the event.

The next day at school, the firefighters attempt to find the cheerleader who saved their friends life. Claire stays silent but is pointed out anyway and the principal questions her. While she is still reluctant to answer, another cheerleader, Jackie, steps up and claims it was she who saved the man, not Claire. Claire lets it go, just happy to have her secret safe, and asks if the man is okay. Soon, Zach confronts her and shamefully admits that he lost the tape, causing Claire to flip. She doesn't realize that it was her father who took the tape and viewed it, nor that he already knew about people with extraordinary powers.

Later on, she has a budding romance with the football team's quarterback, Brody, who she attends a bonfire with. They joke about Jackie and eventually head to the bleachers, slightly tipsy. Brody, however, tries to force himself on Claire and gets violent with her, pushing her backwards into a thick branch which seemingly kills her. She later wakes up in the morgue when the pathologist removes the branch from her head and leaves the room. Claire quickly closes her skin and dons a lab coat, running home.

Later on at school Claire confronts Brody, who disregards her, saying he'd keep doing what he was doing. A fellow student listening in confides in Claire that the same thing happened to her. Enraged, Claire decides to take action. She pretends to flirt with Brody and convinces him to let her drive his car. While driving, she lets him know that although there are no witnesses there is one thing she can do -- and with that she slams the gas and drives right into a wall. In the hospital, she tearfully tells her father what really happened that night. An angered Bennet tells his friend to "hollow him out", and when Claire visits Brody again to offer him a second chance, he doesn't remember her. He doesn't even remember his own name.
Claire becomes more curious about her heritage, hoping to find some answers from her birth parents. Her father tracks them down and invites them to lunch. As Claire is left alone with these two people, Hank and Lisa, she subtly tries to find out if they too have powers, yet it doesn't seem to be that case. She gets the feeling that something is off, although she doesn't know exactly what. Unbeknownst to her, her father paid the two people to act as her parents.

The missing tape eventually turns up again in Zach's possession, Mr. Bennet having snuck it back into his room. As the two of them view the tape her younger brother Lyle walks in and views it, horrified. Claire and Zach chase him and he at first wants nothing to do with either of them, as he fears his sister's abilities. Claire eventually calms him down when she tells him they can't be a family anymore if he reveals her secret, and he agrees not to say anything.

Claire attempts to focus on homecoming even as her popularity among the "cool crowd" suffers due to what she did to Brody. However, the majority of the student body is impressed with her action against him, and votes her homecoming queen. Her rival cheerleader, Jackie, is severely frustrated and accuses Zach of being gay, to which Claire responds by giving the girl a black eye. Bennet then insists his daughter stay home for homecoming, seemingly for the assault, but in reality has seen a gruesome fate for Claire in Issac's paintings. He thinks if he can get her to stay home, she'll live. He doesn't count on Zach sneaking up to her room, convincing her to go. Claire says that he can be her date and starts to accept who she really is rather than whom people want her to be.

Heading for the locker room to change into her cheerleading uniform for the game, she runs into Peter Petrelli, the power mimic, who has come to save the cheerleader in Issac's paintings, not knowing the girl is actually Claire. After a brief exchange, she heads to the locker room where Jackie confronts her, saying that they used to be best friends but have fallen apart. Claire reveals that it was she who saved the fireman and has the event on tape, also telling Jackie that she's stopped trying to be who others want her to be. Just then, the power flickers and the serial killer Sylar makes his appearance. Like Peter, he at first thinks the cheerleader with superpowers is Jackie, and he attacks her. Claire tries to stop him but is thrown backwards, and can only helplessly watch as Jackie's forehead is cut open. She tells Claire to run just before she dies.

Sylar realizes his mistake and goes after Claire, who again runs into Peter. He tells her to keep going and distracts Sylar, getting seriously injured in the encounter, and Claire rushes back to him. The killer is gone and Peter is lying in his own blood, but being in contact with Claire allowed him to mimic her powers, so he recovers right in front of her. Astonished, she asks him his name, and he asks he if by saving her he saved the world (having heard from Future!Hiro that if he saved the cheerleader, he'd save the world). She tells him she doesn't know and runs to get help.

Claire then runs into her father, who has been looking for her the minute he heard she left the house. She tries to go back for Peter, but Bennet tells her the police will take care of everything. Claire tells her father her survival was not due to luck, and it seems she's finally ready to tell him who she really is.

Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality: Claire, when she first started high school, started out trying to please everyone. Her main focus was popularity, but after discovering her powers she started to accept who she truly is, not who people want her to be. You could say discovering her powers opened her eyes - she started to notice who her real friends were. No longer does she stand for Jackie's attitude, and while it still hurts that she's not as popular as she used to be, she doesn't care as much about that as she used to.

Claire is a kind person by nature, usually friendly and, as Brody points out (before he turned out to be a jerk), the "first to laugh at a joke". She loves her family more than anything and part of the reason she hides her power is so that they can stay together. However, once Claire has been angered, she can do some pretty extreme things. She punches a former friend for insulting Zach and hospitalizes a boy that attempted to rape her. It's because she does have a real sense of justice in her - she'd never provoke a fight, but she can't let people get away with things she feels are wrong. Claire may be a little dense and insensitive at times, like not knowing how much Zach cares for her and snapping at him on several occasions, but she's not purposely mean or snobby. She does recognize how much Zach means to her and sort of "rewards" him by making him her date. She's also more perceptive than she's given credit for. After meeting with her "real" parents, it becomes evident she had doubts that the people she had spoken with were really related to her.

Of course, Claire is also your typical teenager in many aspects. She just wants to have fun, live a relatively normal life, and enjoy high school. She wants to date, go to homecoming, and be accepted. However, her destiny is starting to catch up with her, and we can see that by the end of homecoming she's not going to pretend she's normal anymore. She starts to understand that she was indeed meant for something bigger than just cheerleading, and wants to know what it is. Claire is starting to mature into a young woman and indeed, a hero.

Please give us a detailed physical description of your character: Claire is the very image you think of when you think of a cheerleader. She's 5', Caucasian and very much in shape. Her long blonde hair comes down in curls past her shoulders. She's got light blue eyes and usually wears a nice smile. She tends to wear makeup, but so little that it's hardly noticeable. On the rare occasion that she's not wearing her Wildcats cheerleading outfit, she's in casual clothing - usually jeans and t-shirts.

What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's?: Right after "Homecoming", when she goes to sleep that night. So she'll already be traumatized from seeing her friend getting slaughtered!

What kinds of magical/special/crazy powers does your character have, if any?: Claire has a healing factor that would give Wolverine a run for his money. Small cuts vanish almost instantly from her skin, and she can snap broken bones back into place with no visible sign of pain. She once stuck her hand in a garbage disposal, and the only reaction she had to it was a slight grimace. Claire has tested her powers by putting a pipe through her neck, stabbing herself in the chest, tossing herself off of towers, and walking through fire and has survived all of these ordeals unscathed. She was briefly dead for a period of time when a branch was lodged in the base of her head, but once it was removed she regained consciousness. There seems to be nothing so far she can't recover from. The only limitations that have been shown are that she can't recover from an injury if the item that hurt her is removed from her body, and that she can't heal under certain conditions. For example, when she was cut open on the autopsy table, she was only able to heal herself when she put the skin flaps back on her body.

If present, how do you plan to tweak those powers to make him/her appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: Claire can now feel pain, so while she can pop a bone back into place, the experience is going to hurt like hell, as is the experience of the broken bone in the first place. Her healing will take more time than usual, and more serious cuts and burns will take several hours or up to a day to heal. She'll also start feeling a few side effects from her injuries. For example, when Sylar slams her into the wall, her eyesight comes back almost immediately. In Landel's, her eyesight would be fuzzy for a while, and she'd be dizzy from head trauma. She'll also be vulnerable to things like poisons and body altering substances.

Does your character have any other non-magical skills or abilities that we should know about?: Being a cheerleader, Claire is very athletic. She can do all kinds of back flips, jumps, and is generally flexible. She's also got a high school level education, but is also naturally sharp. Claire's also a people person, so she has great social skills.

How about improbable appendages?: None.

Please give us an idea of where you'd like to take your character within the scope of the Landel's Damned RP: Claire's a friendly girl by nature, so she'll have little alliances all around. Also, she'll be delighted to see that there are more people out there like her - people who have powers (even though they are dampened). While she won't actively provoke any fights, she's not going to hang back if someone hurts or insults her - she's not afraid to give someone a nice right hook if she feels they deserve it. Most of her time will be spent trying to escape, collecting any items that can aid her, and breaking into any offices that can give her further information. Since her powers are hindered, she'll travel with allies whenever she can.

What kind of psychological effect do you see Landel's Institute having on your character?: If there's one thing Landel's will actually help Claire with, it'll be helping her mature. Things like homecoming and the latest fall fashions don't matter in a place like Landel's, and seeing as how she's already started to stop being who others want her to be, she will certainly mature. Of course, this place is going to leave some serious emotional scars on her. She's only a 17 year old girl and has never dealt with the kind of torture the staff at Landel's is sure to put her through. To survive, she's going to have to stop being just a cheerleader and truly become a hero. Landel's will certainly mold Claire into more serious young woman, probably with a few mental issues.