Cassandra Cain

[OOC] Good ol' INSANE availability note

2008-07-12T22:56:50Z

So I'm already on this roadtrip thing, and that's been making my online schedule iffy. On Thursday my computer crashed and burned. Basically the screen on my laptop has a short somewhere and I can't actually use it. I can do stuff when I find an external monitor to plug it into, but that's even harder than finding time on the trip.

So... if you're looking for me in the next three weeks or so... Um... I guess you should toss me an email since I can get that on my phone.

Of course I doubt this will actually impact anything, except I may be late pinging Cassandra into threads she needs to be in while I try to find somewhere to use this thing. Now you know.

OOC: Availability and such

2008-05-20T22:13:19Z

I should probably have posted this up sometime before... now, but I figured better late than never.

This summer, all summer, I'm taking a "little roadtrip". Some days I'll be in a place with internet and time, and some days I'll be on the road with internet but an unfortunate need to watch where I'm going. So... if threads get dropped or go into SP, well, I'm sorry in advance!

I'll still be checking in as regularly as I can, but I did want you to know...

Second Floor Common Room, Sunday morning [1/27]

2008-01-27T14:31:30Z

Cassandra had gotten up early, like she usually did, planning to go for a run or something. She'd reached into her closet to find something to wear and had found a knife instead. A familiar one.

She knew what it was, but she didn't know where it had come from. Had it been in her bag all along? Was it just more fandom weirdness? She'd settled onto her bed and turned the blade over and over in her hand for nearly an hour before it occurred to her to check her calender.

January 27. That meant yesterday had been January 26. Her birthday.

Not wanting to wake her roommate, she'd padded into the common room and was busy searching for a hammer or a blow torch or anything she could use to snap the blade. Some memories she could do without.

[ooc: Open for your common-room-ish needs. And hours later I realize that this didn't go to the dorms comm... Er... Whoops.]

Room 212, Monday [1/21]

2008-01-21T20:08:31Z

Cassandra had woken up this morning and then spent about an hour staring blankly at the ceiling. Then she had spent thirty minutes or so trying to convince herself that it had been a dream. Then another half hour reminding herself that Fandom weirdness happened and that it didn't mean anything.

Because even if she had been herself, she hadn't been... herself, right?

It wasn't that she'd done anything bad or different. Sparring, talking to people (though she had seemed to talk more), but it's not like she'd done anything bad. It was remembering what she had thought that was bothering her.

Ever since she left her father, Cassandra had lived with a constant sense of guilt. She had taken a life. It had only grown worse when she had killed her mother a few months ago. But... the person she had been this weekend hadn't felt any guilt. None. What's more, she had killed more people. A lot more people.

It had never occurred to her that she might be without that sense of responsibility. It was a scary sort of thought. And an intriguing sort of thought. Could she find a way to lose the guilt? Did she really want to?

[ooc: This could have been on the roof, I suppose, but the door's open here too.]

Room 212, Saturday [1/19]

2008-01-19T15:21:49Z

Cassandra's eyes snapped open when she realized that she wasn't in her bed. She rolled immediately to the side, planning to drop to the floor and take stock, but ended up rolling into a wall instead. That made her immediately reverse direction which did lead to her landing on the floor in a crouch.

Something was very, very wrong. Why had she slept in her combat suit? Why had she slept with all of her gear still on? After reaching over her shoulder to make sure her katana was hanging properly she stalked over to the door and yanked it open.

"There better be a very, very good explanation for this," she growled under her breath as she prepared to go find some answers.

[ooc: Establishy and open. Cassandra is... herself, sort of. AU Cassandra Cain is the ruthless head of the League of Assassins. Unlike regular Cassandra, this one kills people for fun and profit. And she is not happy today.]

Room 212, Wedensday [11/21]

2007-11-21T08:04:00Z

When Meg left the room in the morning Cassandra locked the door behind her. Then she sat down on the floor, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back against her bed.

"I'm sorry," she whispered into the empty room. It wasn't enough, really, but it was all she could offer.

[ooc: establishy, and I'm offline until Thursday]

Room 212, Tuesday evening [11/20]

2007-11-20T22:57:29Z

Cassandra blinked at the small desk calender she had in her lap. It had snuck up on her. That hadn't happened before. Usually she was thinking about the date weeks in advance. She hadn't even made any plans.

With a thoughtful frown she considered her options. A number were discarded before she made up her mind and leaned back to sprawl on her bed. She knew what she'd do.

[ooc: Open, any threads take place before the one with the roomie.]

Room 212, Late Saturday morning

2007-10-20T16:53:23Z

Cassandra hadn't left her room since Friday. Too many new people at once, most of them loud in their way. Instead she had decided to work on her reading comprehension some more.

So she sat in the middle of the floor with a book in her lap and a now-cold cup of tea beside her.

[ooc: Door is closed, but don't let that stop you since the post is open.]

Room 212, early Friday morning

2007-10-19T14:17:43Z

There was an air of excitement around Fandom. Part of it was the lack of classes for the week, but it was more than that. There were visitors coming. Cassandra was holed up in her room this morning with a cup of tea. She wasn't entirely sure she was up to being reminded of all she lost when she walked away from her old life, and seeing her new friends with their old friends would be a pretty pointed reminder.

At least no one from Gotham knew she was here, so she wouldn't have to deal with that.

[ooc: Establishy and stuff!]

Room 212, Monday evening

2007-10-15T22:36:40Z

Cassandra was sitting in the middle of her room on the floor with a look of deep concentration on her face and a book sitting in her lap. A closer look might have revealed that it was, indeed, a copy of See Spot Run.

What? She was still pretty much illiterate.

[ooc: Door's open]

Cassandra's Back-story

2007-09-05T14:37:44Z

This post contains spoilers for pretty much all DC comics canon in which Batgirl participated. Especially the eponymous run of Batgirl.

Cassandra Cain is the daughter of master assassin David Cain and Shiva Woo'san (who is widely regarded to be the most deadly woman alive). She was left in Cain's care while Shiva continued her own training.

Cain had some very interesting ideas about training people. What he wanted was the perfect human weapon, and he thought the best way to achieve that was to train someone to read body language fluently. He realized that in order to do that, he would need to begin training before the language centers of the brain could stabilize, and that meant he needed a child.

Cassandra wasn't Cain's first attempt, though she was the first (and only) child to both survive the training and remain (relatively) sane. Cain's methods of teaching were pretty brutal. He raised Cassandra in an environment where no one every talked to her, forcing her to recognize movements as a form of communication. He constantly tested her against various opponents.

Further, in order to "keep her on her toes" and help her develop her situational awareness, Cain would shoot Cassandra randomly. He also used guns to increase Cassandra's tolerance for pain by playing a variation of "two for flinching".

Eventually, Cain decided that the time had come to test Cassandra for real, and at the age of eight he sent her on her first assassination. This ended up backfiring. Cassandra located her target, took out his bodyguards, and then ripped out his throat, but... She saw him die, and that meant that she understood exactly what she had done.

So she ran, fleeing from Cain and unable to forget the horror of what she had done.

There's more, which I may one day actually add, but this is the stuff that shaped Cassandra most strongly.

Cassandra's Voicemail

2007-09-05T14:02:22Z

"You've reached my... um... thing. You should... do the thing... Um... that's it?"