Understand the secrets and have some fun

[these_balls]

APPLICATIONS!
Currently: Closed!
Route 29 has closed as of May 30th. For the continuation of the game, please visit victory_road!

Applications will be normally checked during the weekend following the first and third Sunday of each month unless otherwise stated, and we will allow one application per person during one application cycle. Remember, the most characters one player can have at a time is currently set at five.

Applications received after 11:59 PM EST on Saturday of the first and third weekend of each month will be checked the following app weekend unless otherwise stated.

We now ask that potential applicants post their application in comments rather than linking. If their application contains explicit references to 'hard' spoilers (character death, unforeseen plot twists, big reveals, he was evil all along etc), players should put the application in their own journal or their character's journal and link it, making sure to mention the presence of spoilers within. For further clarification on our spoilers policy and whether or not your application needs to be linked, please check this page. Thank you for your cooperation!

The comment character limit on dreamwidth is 16,000 characters so apps no longer need to be split into multiple comments; however this is at players' discretion.

Please use the form below and post your application in comments rather than linking if you can. If you have any questions, feel free to ask either of the mods. You can reach us through emails, IMs, or PMs.

A reminder for those waiting to hear back, please don't be worried if we skip yours while going through them. It only means we needed a little more time to research!

Helpful links!
Taken: 1|2|3 / Reserves
Please do not app a character from either of these unless you reserved them!
Starter Pokémon!
A compiled list of the starter pokémon to choose from offered in Route 29!
Word Count Tool!
Word count! It has other pointless stats too.
Navigation


<u><b>Player</u></b> <b>Name:</b> <b>Personal Journal:</b> <user name=""> <b>E-mail:</b> <b>AIM/Plurk/Etc.:</b> <b>Timezone:</b> <b>Current Characters in Route:</b> <b><u>Character</u></b> <b>Name:</b> <b>Series:</b> <b>Timeline:</b> <b>Canon Resource Links:</b> Here we would have the links to wikis and other information sites. If none of those seem to provide enough information, feel free to add more about the character here. However, please do not use this section as a full history section unless your canon is ridiculously obscure. General rule of thumb: if there are a good amount of descriptive resources, please just link them and use this section to add in what may have been left out, as opposed to writing an entire history section. <b>Personality:</b> Give us at minimum 2-3 full paragraphs of how you understand your character's personality. Talk about basic characteristics, any major developments over the course of their canon, their motives, their social behavior, and anything else you can think of that shows off your knowledge of this character. <b>Strengths/Weaknesses:</b> Try to cover the good points of what they can do, their life skills (not necessarily powers, but things they're just good at). Go into their biggest fears and what they just can’t do. <b><u>Pokémon Information</u></b> <b>Affiliation:</b> What career path will your character be taking? Breeder, Trainer? Or maybe even down the dark path of becoming a member of Team Rocket? Note: All Rocket members start as grunts. (For right now, only those three positions are available, whether your character chooses to follow their assigned path or not.) <b>Starter:</b> What starter pokémon do you want your character to have? Please use the list linked above to choose from. Certain pokémon have an orange star next to their names; if you choose one of these starters (Deino, Zorua, Litwick, Pikachu, Scyther, Dratini, Bagon, Gible, Axew, Ralts, Riolu, Beldum, Larvitar, Eevee, or Beldum) you must provide reasoning. You do not need to explain your reasoning for pokémon other than those listed above. <b>Password:</b> This is where you'll put the passwords from the Rules and the F.A.Q. There are two words, to assure you've read both. <b><u>Samples</u></b> <b>First Person Sample:</b> The sample must take place in Route_29's setting. Eight sentences is the minimum. This is a PokéConnect post--one that will be on the character's journal, broadcast to the network. Although it is short, it needs to show how your character would communicate with others, as well as be descriptive enough to express the character's voice without sounding too generic. <b>Third Person Sample:</b> The sample must take place in Route_29's setting. The minimum is 300 words. Please note that what we are looking for is an inner working into the character’s thoughts and actions, and how the character responds to the setting, not something that could be taken as an excerpt fanfic. You may use other characters to bounce your characters actions off of, but everything should still be mostly from their point of view.

Comments

Dirk Strider ♡ Homestuck ♡ I think my reserve expired.

[heartsplintered]

Personality:

Something you should know about any and all Striders is that they are complete goobers underneath an attempted cold exterior of complete and utter ironic coolness. Dirk pulls off the coolness factor reasonably well, or at least considerably better than his beta counterpart, Dave. This does not mean he is without goober aspects. He has, and I quote, been referenced to love Rainbow Dash from the recent cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is magic, unironically, because "she is so spunky <3". He is, however, in a constant state of plotting and scheming, always being the puppeteer behind plans as they go into motion. He needs, moreso than he even wants, to be in control of any given situation. He is also actually relatively stoic. Dirk is very hard to read, despite being a surprisingly emotional teenage boy, and buries his emotions and insecurities in impressive work on robots and artificial intelligence.

More on that, Dirk's sort of a genius. He created an aggregate artificial intelligence of his thirteen year old self that he implanted in a pair of completely ironic sunglasses (that very closely resemble those of Kamina from Gurren Lagann, except they are black). The AI serves as an auto-responder for Dirk-- basically a perpetual and semi-sentient away message to answer his friends when he is busy or just plain doesn't feel like answering them himself. This later proceeded to be a serious kick in the ass, as Dirk has some pretty deeply-rooted self-loathing issues, and having a perpetual companion that is essentially yourself at thirteen reminding you of your flaws is taxing at best. The auto-responder, later called Lil Hal in an homage to the character Hal 9000 featured in the Space Odyssey series, is guaranteed to be 96% indistinguishable from Dirk's native neurological responses, basically making it more or less a brain clone (which is actually entirely true-- the AR is said to have been made from a copy of Dirk's own brain). Dirk has also built numerous robots for various purposes-- one of which he sent in pieces to his best friend Jake English, who put it together on his jungle island. Dirk then used the robot, called "Brobot", to train Jake to become a stronger, more efficient fighter (Dirk is a strong believer in efficiency). He also built a robotic bunny for Jane Crocker's thirteenth birthday, a funny little metal rabbit with an orange pair of sunglasses just like Dirk's own and a blue hat on its breast. The other two robots seen in-comic he has created are called Sawtooth and Squarewave, and serve as Dirk's pseudo-guardian-friends. They regularly have rap-offs, particularly Squarewave.

Dirk is immensely socially inept. This is only in part his fault, as he grew up in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic Houston, Texas, in an apartment suspended above a watery grave of what was once a sprawling metropolis. The only other living human being in this time (Dirk was born the year 2409, and is currently sixteen) was a one Roxy Lalonde, and was quoted to be some 3,000 miles from Dirk in one of the only remaining suburbs on the planet, even if it was devoid of other humans (given that Dirk has a rocket board that allows him to basically fly, one could assume that if he had really wanted to, he could have gotten to Roxy, but chose not to). His only form of communication with anyone was via the internet, chatting with his three best friends (the aforementioned Jake English and Roxy Lalonde, and Jane Crocker, the latter of whom hails from the same past-timeline as Jake).

Dirk is sort of intensely introverted, though not that he has much of a choice given the status of his childhood. He is very tense and calculating, and he never sleeps. In Homestuck characters have what amounts to more than one "self", their physical personage and their "dream self", which exists on one of two planets, called Derse and Prospit. Dirk is a Derse dreamer, and Dirk's dream self has been awake for years. This is an uncommon happenstance, and even more uncommon is that Dirk was aware of it. Dirk quoted that, after some practice, he "learned how to be awake there while awake [on Earth] too", meaning he sort of exists in a perpetual state of dual-consciousness. It should be noted, however, that in order to enter the game session Dirk had to decapitate his physical self, eventually causing his dreamself to take over its role and eliminating his state of dual-consciousness. He has functioned as a singular-consciousness for approximately five months now.

He's also kind of a jerk, but in a strange subtle way. He is primarily interested in the growth and strength of his friends, though his methods can be a bit intense. He seems to be particularly fond of giving Jake a hard time, though that is easily explained by the fact that for a good number of years he was entirely infatuated with the guy. As previously mentioned, he sent Jake what amounts to a death robot for training and insisted that Dirk fight the robot to its essential death for the uranium power source that served as its "heart" when Jake used his own source of uranium carelessly. He is extremely analytical and judgmental of his friends, coming off as pretty obnoxious when he basically pushes them to do things how he figures they out to (cases in point; he repeatedly makes attempts at making Jake more skeptical as he is about the most gullible dunderfuck on the planet, and tries to get Jane, known for her extreme skepticism, to loosen up).

Dirk is also noted to be relatively ruthless. In his time spent on Derse, once he was truly "awake", he foiled an assassination attempt on him by one of the Big Bads of the series by killing the assassin and mounting his head on a stake which he then carried around with him. Along with this he essentially left a warning, stating "The Prince is awake, your shit is wrecked,". This refers to his God Tier title, being the Prince of Heart, but also speaks for Dirk's confidence in his own ability to accomplish things. When dealing with a crazy alien overlord that single-handedly wiped out nearly the entirety of the rest of the human race, Dirk has the audacity to be cheeky with her. This ruthlessness and ambition to achieve his goals regardless of how carries over to how he treats himself, as well, given he actually decapitates himself to send his head to Jake in order to save them all and properly initiate their session when things start to go bad.

Strengths/Weaknesses:

+ Rapping. And words in general, really. His fetch modus is called Tech-Hop, so in order to access anything in his inventory he has to come up with a rhyme about it. He's heavily verbose in all of his chat logs, though it's reasonable to say he probably doesn't actually talk overmuch. He's concise and to the point almost always, but a lot of what he talks about requires a good amount of words to be as such. The auto-responder is much the same, though being that it represents Dirk when he was thirteen, it swears a good amount more regularly, and uses fewer intellectual quips than Dirk at sixteen.
- The auto-responder leads to Dirk not physically having many conversations with people, leading possibly to a good amount of his social ineptitude. It's also a sort of escapist method of Dirk not having to deal with things, while at the same time being the double-edged sword of him constantly having to deal with himself.

+ Ambition. Dirk will go to the ends of the earth and back to accomplish a goal. He's always plotting, scheming, pulling strings, and making plans to keep things running exactly the way they need to be. To this end he will do anything at his own expense to further his goals, and by extension the overall goals of the group's session. This included decapitating himself and allowing affection that went against his own preferences and sexuality for the benefit of Roxy (though it is also relatively easy to assume that he figured her Trickster magic might make him feel less miserable).
- This unfortunately is a very self-destructive ambition. For as controlling as he is, he pretty much outright refuses to enact plans that would put any of the others in anything like the situations he would put himself into. In a way, however, this could be overconfidence, in that he will only subject himself to these tasks because he assumes himself to be the only one able to handle them. It may very well also be another subtle way of his to control the situation.

+ Robotics/Intelligence. Holy shit this kid is smart. As previously mentioned he has created a number of sentient robots as well as a complete artificial intelligence said to be created from a copy of his own brain. Obviously this means he knows his way around wiring and mechanics, as well as generalized human responses. He's also exhibited and intelligence toward numbers, for statistics spat out at the drop of a hat (though this is seen less often in Dirk than it is in the auto-responder, leading one to believe that it was more common in Dirk at age thirteen and he sort of grew out of the habit).
- The whole robots thing probably greatly contributed to his overall social ineptitude, and makes him regularly come off as cold and uncaring, which is comically quite the opposite of reality.

+ Multitasking. Due likely at least in part to his previous state of dual-consciousness, Dirk has a pretty sicknasty ability to do a bajillion things at once. This is aided, of course, by his auto-responder, and in fact may have something to do with why he created it, to serve as a perpetual answering service in case he were away doing something but needed to have a conversation he could look back on at a later time. You could say he has all of his irons constantly in the fire.
- The drawback to this is that it makes him very detached and is what leads a lot of people to assume him cold and even robotic in nature. He has actually had very few conversations with Jake himself, a huge portion of the chats they have being in fact carried out with the auto-responder for Dirk to look over when he got to it.

+ Agility. Dirk does this cool thing called flashstepping that is an inherent Strider trait that basically allows him to move so fast he's nearly teleporting. This, in conjunction with his ability with a sword and his "Unbreakable Katana" make him a very formidable opponent in a fight. He was able to take on the Condescension's Imperial Drones, though it is to be noted that he only survived due to the assistance of Sawtooth, his larger guardian robot.
- This makes him one hell of a slippery kid, and given his evasive nature on topics he isn't interested in discussing, it heavily aids his escapism.

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Wingull
Password: Ginger Snaps

Samples
First Person Sample:

Is it acceptable to name a Pokemon "ass"? Because son of a dick, this Wingull is a pain in mine.
Are they meant to be this hyperactive or is this one just mentally deficient? I guess it shines all sorts of new light on the term "bird brain". Or lack thereof.
For any of you out there that are Pokemon PETA activists or whatever, I'm not actually gonna name the thing ass. The idea has some serious merits, but I'm not actually that kind of guy.
I also sincerely hope there isn't actually a Pokemon PETA. That's just seven kinds of fuckin' terrifying.
Ah...
Here's to hopin' this isn't meant to be G-Rated. I'm not great at that.

Third Person Sample:

He wasn't about to knock the sudden friendly childhood game basis of the dream bubble. He almost welcomed it, despite knowing that he was going to have to get back to his responsibilities pretty soon. He didn't honestly remember falling asleep, and initially he was pretty pissed about it, but... Well, a little break couldn't hurt.

Who the hell was he kidding-- he was clawing at the walls pretty much instantaneously. And it only got worse as he slowly came to the stomach-twisting realization that this didn't appear to be a dream bubble at all. No one around was familiar, but there were still people. Not trolls, just normal people. All with this weird recurring Pokemon Trainer theme. Maybe he'd just gotten hit really hard in the head.

Figuring that dream bubble or not he could only go along with it until it ended, Dirk's first order of business was to get something other than his ridiculous God Tier pajamas to wear, because the puffy asshole pants were really cramping his style and he'd never been a fan of tights. Redressed in something more comfy, he finally indulged in the gaming impulse to pick a damn starter Pokemon-- maybe once he started playing by the rules of his surroundings he'd reach the end of it and wake up where he could actually do some good again.

He didn't know why he chose the Wingull, but he was pretty much instantaneously chagrined by the decision. The thing seemed to be good at pretty much one thing and one thing only-- evading the ball it was meant to be kept in. It seemed to think Dirk's hair was a much better place to take up residency, and the Strider only had the patience to swat it away three times before he gave up and trudged along with the bird Pokemon perched proudly atop his head.

[these_balls]

Hey, there! Unfortunately, this application was submitted after our app deadline for the week, and the app password is incorrect. Please look over our Rules and FAQ Pages again, and once you've fixed the app password (just commenting here to us with the correct one is fine!), your app will be first in line to be adjudicated during our next app cycle!

[heartsplintered]

Herp derp this is horrifically late I'm gomen. Current password is Holland Daze!

ACCEPTED!

[these_balls]

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Pokemon!
Congratulations, you have a fun and exciting adventure awaiting you.

Now that you've been accepted...
[○] Respond to this with your character's journal. This is a must!
[○] Comment in the Taken Characters post, alphabetized by series: # thru G, H thru O, or P thru Z.
[○] Comment to the Friend Add/Remove, and update your friends list.
[○] Join the following communities: route_29, route_006, route_1065, pokedaycare. Only Team Rocket personnel should join rocket_hq, but we ask that all Route members subscribe to it.
Note! You will not be accepted to the main or logs community until you've commented in the aforementioned places.
[○] If you're still on the reserved list, please let us know that they've been accepted.
[○] Please make sure to check out the Calendar for the weather and upcoming plots and swarms!
[○] Route 29 has an optional spam/meme community; it's slowpoke_gif!

We'd also like to take this moment to inform you of the Eastern Kanto Ferry! For only P2000, you can take a three day, all-inclusive ferry ride from New Bark Town to Pallet Town and begin a new pokémon journey in the Kanto region! Otherwise, feel free to start in Johto!

Thank you! See you in the Pokémon world!

[heartsplintered]

Yes hello.

[these_balls]

Your community requests will be approved once you comment to the friend add/remove post.