Medical Officer Frank DuFresne (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
docinawall) wrote2011-11-29 07:36 pm
docinawall) wrote2011-11-29 07:36 pm
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realityshifted
Player Name: Megumi
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kmegumi2
Email and/or AIM: kmegumi2@yahoo.com
Timezone: CST
Other Characters: Oliver Day (oliverplus) and DI Patricia Menzies (grip_on_reality)
Character: Medical Officer Frank DuFresne (Doc)
Series: Red vs. Blue
Deviance: 1
Age: ~30 years
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Canon Used: Seasons 1-8 (primarily 2-5, 8).
Appearance: Doc is typically found in a full suit of purple combat armor, as seen here and here. It will take a real force of will to convince him it's safe enough to be without it. He carries a medical scanner that looks like so.
Psychology: Doc has always been drawn to working with other people. He thrives on being part of a team, which is his only real goal in life. Because of this, he has a tendency to latch onto the goals of whoever happens to be nearby and attempt to assist them in any way he can. Despite his morals of pacifism and non-discrimination, if he ends up on a team with someone who is out to hurt or kill people, he's quite happy to go along with them, protesting their plans all the while, but showing no real resistence. Being part of a team is being part of a team, after all!
Unfortunately, being the incapable person that he is, his help for others isn't usually very effective. Because this leads to frequent rejections, Doc has become extremely resilient over the years. When a goal goes wrong, he turns around and latches onto someone else without even missing a beat.
One ideal that Doc does hold for himself is that he is a pacifist. He dislikes conflict and disorder on the whole, especially as he has a tendency to end up on the losing end of it, and he also very much dislikes being in danger, so pacifism seems like a great way to avoid all those problems at once. Oddly enough, he finds himself drawn to violence and war, so he has compensated for his own contradictions by joining the army as a conscientious objector and becoming a medic. As Doc is usually very flexible in his goals and decisions, this seems like a natural solution, and he's quite happy with his current path in life.
Recently, Doc's manner has changed because of his possession by the megalomaniacal AI Omega (O'Malley). O'Malley used Doc's body to forward his plans to either destroy or conquer the universe (he never seemed quite sure which), and Doc, being weak-willed and lacking convictions, had almost no control while O'Malley was in his mind. During the possession, Doc made very few decisions about his life. Being Doc, he didn't mind O'Malley's use of his body enough to do anything about it other than whine now and then that O'Malley shouldn't hurt or kill people. Having O'Malley in his head had psychological effects, however, bringing out Doc's inner fascination with violence and seeping into his personality a touch. Over the course of the possession, Doc's manner became sharper, and he has started to use a little foul language--though mostly under his breath and when he doesn't expect to be heard.
Doc is eternally practical--sometimes overly so. Not even possession by a psychopath can stop his practicality. Doc always keeps health considerations in mind, such as stress levels and mental health. He is practical in other ways, as well, and is even mindful of Feng Shui and resale value when he and O'Malley are setting up an evil lair. Arguably, since the point of the evil lair is to destroy the world, resale value shouldn't be an issue, but you can't be too careful, can you?
One last major aspect of Doc's personality is that he is a coward. To him, self-preservation is just as important a value as pacifism, and he will not hesitate to run and hide in a dangerous situation, as long as he feels he can do so safely. Though he won't admit it, most of his adherence to pacifism is based on its ability to be a good excuse in the face of battle. He is not noble, brave, or clever, but he knows how to run and hide, and that's a skill that has served him well in life.
Other Skills/Abilities: Doc is a decent runner; he even lettered in track in high school. Between his attempt at medical school and his position as a medic, he has had some medical training and knows how to interpret some of the readings he sees from his medical scanner. He has had related stress management training as well. Some more notable talents are that he is good at yoga and knowledgeable about Feng Shui.
Other Weaknesses: Doc has few reliable medical abilities, and unfortunately, his job is to be a full-fledged medic. Otherwise, Doc is human, and while his armor acts as protection from a lot of physical dangers, he still has all the normal human vulnerabilities underneath. For example, bullets can pierce his armor, though it does offer some degree of protection. His mental defenses are also nothing to write home about; he is easily susceptible to the influences of other mental constructs (like an AI). Finally, he can't throw well. At all. Seriously, you don't want to see him try.
History: A pacifist and an aspiring doctor, Doc started on his main path in life when he went to medical school at Jamaica State. Unfortunately for Doc, he swiftly failed out, but undeterred, he resolved to become a medic instead. Despite his pacifism, he joined the army--as a conscientious objector, of course. Once he had signed up and been tested, his lack of qualifications and field abilities led to his placement in the Red Army at one of the simulation outposts used to train Freelancer agents. However, as Doc refused to fight, the Red Army's leadership decided to get rid of him. Unfortunately for them, Blue Army wouldn't take him either. Eventually, the two armies compromised by making Doc a neutral medic working for both sides of the conflict. Doc was content with the result.
For a while, Doc's life followed a standard pattern of performing horribly at medical training, visiting injured soldiers, and performing horribly at helping them. This monotonous life, however, changed when Doc was sent to Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha to help the injured Freelancer Tex. She had been working for the Blue Team, so he was sent to them first. After helping Tex, Doc's next objective was to medically assist, as needed, the other soldiers on both the Red and Blue sides. Unfortunately, as it took Doc three months to arrive, Tex had long since died by the time he reached Blue Base (or, at least, her body had; she would reappear later, apparently as a ghost). Tucker, Church, and Caboose showed Doc the graves--one for Tex and one for Church, and Caboose attempted to explain how Church had died and then come back seemingly as a ghost and taken over the body of a Mexican robot (Lopez, from the Red Team).
Since he couldn't give Tex any medical help, Doc moved on to the next part of his mission. However, it took another unfortunate turn when, just as he finished checking the vitals of the Blue Team members, they were attacked by the Reds. Doc refused to help in the fight, so Church shot Caboose in the foot to convince him to get involved. Doc, using his superior medical skills, rubbed Caboose's neck with aloe vera. Caboose was fine afterwards, although his toe fell off. By this time, the Blues had decided Doc was quite useless. Meanwhile, the Reds ran out of ammo, and they offered the Blues a chance to surrender in an attempt to hide their mistake. The Blues then offered Doc to the Reds as a "Blue" hostage, not telling them that Doc was supposedly neutral and needed to go to their base to scan them anyway.
At Red Base, Doc was held as a prisoner because everyone believed him to be a Blue. Grif was set to guard Doc. They chatted at first, but Doc tried to ingratiate himself to the other Reds by telling them that he and Grif were not friends since it was obvious that none of the others liked Grif. Having severed his only possible connection to that team, Doc was apparently going to be their prisoner indefinitely--until Church, using the robot Lopez's body, accidentally remotely activated the Red Team's jeep. The jeep ran into Doc, knocking him into the driver's seat and driving off with him--and then bringing him back and pinning the Red's Sargeant, Sarge, into a wall. The jeep's machine gun then came online and very nearly killed him before Church lost the remote connection. After that, Doc attempted to back up the jeep to free Sarge, except in his panic, he slammed it forward into Sarge twice by accident.
The Reds, completely fed up with Doc, forced him to get out of the jeep and marched him back to Blue Base, where they tried to give him back to the Blues. Suspicious that this was some sort of trick, the Blues refused. The Reds wouldn't take him back to their base either; Grif even threw Doc's own words back at him about not associating with people who aren't popular. Doc was left alone in the middle of the canyon. With nowhere left to go, he retreated to the canyon's caves. There, he tried to contact Command. Unfortunately for Doc, when Vic at Command heard that Doc not only hadn't completed his mission but had even managed to alienate everyone in the canyon, he refused to take him back until he made some friends. With no way to leave the canyon, Doc was forced to live in the caves. Doc continued his solitary life in the caves until he stumbled upon a strange purple relic that he thought was an alien artifact, which was really a vehicle known as a Ghost. He radioed Command about it.
At the same time, the Blues were working to kill O'Malley (Omega), a malevolent experimental AI from the Freelancer program that had been assigned to Tex. O'Malley had the ability to use radios to jump from one host to another, and just before Tex's injury and death, he had jumped into the mind of Caboose, another Blue soldier, to save himself. In order to kill him once and for all, the "ghosts" Church and Tex jumped into Caboose's mind, forcing O'Malley out of him while the Blues' other soldier, Tucker, with the help of a singing Lopez, got all the Reds to shut off their helmet radios. Their plan was thwarted when O'Malley used his radio-traveling ability to reach the only person in the canyon with a radio that was still on--Doc, calling Command. Doc was shocked at first to find himself suddenly making horribly violent declarations. He even threatened to eat Vic's children! After Doc found that even yoga didn't solve the problem, he spent a while feeling extremely confused and frightened of himself.
Still stranded in the cave, but now with O'Malley in his mind, Doc and O'Malley eventually came to an understanding and began to work together toward O'Malley's plan to either conquer or destroy the universe (Or perhaps both. He was never entirely clear). O'Malley was in near-complete control of Doc's body from this point, and Doc proceeded to be mainly along for the ride, although he did protest O'Malley's planned violence every once in a while.
Riding the Ghost, Doc/O'Malley flew into a battle between the Reds and Blues, where O'Malley apparently shot Tucker with a rocket launcher. (Some time-travel hijincks make his responsibility questionable, but he had a rocket launcher ready to fire at everyone, at least.) He seized the Reds' robot Lopez, and he Lopez together fled through the Red Team's teleporter, ending up on the snowy outpost Sidewinder.
At that point, O'Malley's plan led to the Reds and Blues joining forces because the Reds needed Lopez back for the secret plans hidden within him and the Blues wanted Doc back so he could help the injured Tucker. Everyone except Donut from the Reds and Sheila, the Blues' tank, followed O'Malley through the teleporter. As part of a deal, the Reds had built two robotic bodies, one of which Church was now possessing. The other was possessed by Tex immediately after the group went through the teleporter, and she soon followed them. The Reds and Blues, thrown into various places by the teleporter, struggled to reunite. This involved activating the secret microphone in one of Sarge's robot bodies, which Tex was possessing. Unfortunately, Caboose pressed the button to activate the other robot--Church's--which contained a 10 megaton bomb.
Meanwhile, O'Malley/Doc expanded their evil plans. O'Malley teamed up with Vic from Command to hire the Freelancer Wyoming to take out Tucker, who had discovered that Vic was acting as Command for both the Red and Blue sides. While Wyoming didn't manage to kill Tucker, he did capture Tex, preventing her from meddling in their plans. And as it turned out, O'Malley had brought everyone together on purpose so that he could activate Lopez's weather control device, which he had adjusted in order to cause ridiculous amounts of destruction, and unleash it on them.
When everyone came together on Sidewinder and O'Malley activated the device, he had to fight the group as it warmed up. While he was attacking with the rocket launcher, the Reds' soldier Simmons used the teleporter to bring a bunch of Grunts--multiplayer soldiers--from another area to Sidewinder. He fooled them with a claim that O'Malley had their flag, leading them to attack and ultimately defeat him, although Doc wasn't killed--he was only injured. The Reds and Blues attempted to disarm the bomb in Church's robotic body in the meantime, but a lightning bolt caused by Lopez' weather device fused the detonator. In the end, the bomb went off, and everyone, including O'Malley, was blown in a variety of directions.
After the explosion, O'Malley found Lopez's head, which was apparently all that remained of him after the blast. He carried him until they reached the abandoned base on Zanzibar, which he decided to set up as his evil lair in preparation for a new plan to take over (or destroy) the universe. O'Malley also set up a secret laboratory nearby. He ignored Doc's protests about wanting to inspect the place before they decided to live there, but Doc was at least comforted that, according to Feng Shui, it was 88% good luck--and it had a computer for him to work on his blog. Unexpectedly, one of the Red Grunts was blown near Zanzibar by the explosion, and O'Malley recruited him as a minion. Doc got to hang motivational posters in the living room in return.
O'Malley also caught sight of someone watching him--Tex--but she swiftly disappeared. She sent out a radio signal to let the others know where O'Malley's base was, and they all gathered at Zanzibar. Tex outlined her plan for them to break into the fortress and plant a bomb to destroy it. Meanwhile, the Red Grunt spotted the group on the beach and let O'Malley know about them. A battle ensued, during which Tucker fell through into a secret hold below Zanzibar's windmill and found a special weapon--an energy sword. He then rejoined the group in the main building, discovering that, unfortunately, bringing the sword into it caused the building to lock down. Even worse, they had Tex's bomb with them, which was on a countdown they had no way of stopping.
Thankfully, Church, who had been sent into the past during the explosion, made it back in time to activate the computer, Gary, whom he had met in the past (and who would turn out to be Wyoming's AI, Gamma, who actually had a time distortion unit). Gary stopped the countdown on the bomb.
O'Malley escaped with Lopez's head and began engineering new plans. He had Lopez build a robot army to kill them all. Lopez took "day of victory" literally, however, and made his robot army move extremely slowly. Then Donut managed to steal O'Malley's Ghost while he was arguing with Lopez. Worst of all, an alien arrived and began decimating O'Malley's army, even attacking O'Malley and Lopez.
The alien also attacked Church, scaring him right out of his body, and Tex went after it and lost her body, too. Caboose, however, befriended it, allowing the others to get their bodies back. When the alien saw Tucker's sword, though, it immediately attacked him viciously. Unbeknownst to everyone, it was impregnating him. The sword was tied to the DNA of the first creature to retrieve it, so the alien needed Tucker to have a human/alien hybrid baby that would then claim the sword for the aliens.
After some awkward attempts at conversation, Tex discovered that her bomb, Andy, could serve as a translator for the alien, and it told Tucker that, because he had the sword, he had to go on a quest that required it. Caboose, Andy, and Tex went with him. At the end of the quest, the alien tried to take the prize--another vehicle, a Banshee, but Wyoming had caught up with them, and he immediately destroyed the Banshee and the alien. Tex went after Wyoming, but Tucker and Caboose (with Andy) returned to Blood Gulch, joining Church and the Reds, who were there already. By this time, Tucker was ill, but no one knew what was causing his illness. Andy suggested they call a doctor, so Church did just that--he called Doc, still possessed by O'Malley, and asked him to come examine Tucker. O'Malley came to their base, bringing Lopez with him as a lookout. He examined Tucker and diagnosed him with pregnancy. Even though Church didn't believe him, Doc decided he would help Tucker give birth.
Meanwhile, the Reds found Lopez and stole Andy the bomb so that he could translate the secret plans stored in Lopez's head in Spanish. Church took the tank, Sheila, and went after Andy, leaving Caboose at the base with Doc and Tucker, who went into labor. Doc helped to deliver Tucker's alien baby. At the same time, the Reds used the radio to call Command, and O'Malley left Doc. Caboose radioed Church to tell him, and generally too many people used the radio in that span of time for anyone to be sure whom O'Malley had gone to.
Tucker fell into a brief coma after the birth of the baby, and Caboose donated some blood to it at Doc's request. Church was determined to kill the baby, but Doc refused to let him into the base. Church was distracted then when a ship crashed on top of the Red soldier Donut. It turned out to be carrying Grif's sister, who had joined the army. Since she was color blind, she had joined the Blue Army rather than the Red Army like Grif. When the Reds figured this out, they decided to send her to the Blue side. Doc, who was mostly acting as a baby-sitter for Tucker's baby at this point, gave the new recruit a physical.
Before that, Church had sent Doc to speak to their tank, Sheila, who was acting erratic. They were suspicious that O'Malley was in her. Doc was only able to confirm that she was acting oddly. So Tex, Church, and Caboose came up with a plan in which Caboose distracted Sheila until Tex could take her offline. Just as she was being taken offline, however, she revealed that she knew where O'Malley had gone. To bring her back online, they transferred her AI from the tank into Sister's ship, a Pelican. Tex also told Church that Wyoming had disappeared after she had captured him, at which point Church discovered that the computer, Gary, had actually been Wyoming's AI, Gamma, manipulating them all along.
Meanwhile, the Reds had discovered a system of caves under their bases, which Donut had fallen into when the ship had crashed on him. These caves turned out to hold a surveillance station, manned by the AI Vic. He had spent all this time acting as Red and Blue Command to Blood Gulch when he was actually watching both sides from underneath the canyon. In reality, Vic, Andy, Wyoming, O'Malley, and the aliens were engineering an elaborate plot. The aliens meant to use Tucker's part-alien child to steal the sword, and O'Malley had agreed to help them, but what he really wanted was to possess that baby so that he could go back to the aliens' homeworld and destroy them all. This would have ended the Freelancers' war, so Wyoming was glad to help. Andy became involved as a translator between O'Malley and the aliens. The aliens had resurrected the corpse of the Blues' previous leader, Captain Flowers, for O'Malley to possess, which was why he had left Doc.
Knowing that the Reds were in the caves, Vic called the Blues, telling them to attack the Reds and recommending they come at them through the caves. Church thought that sounded ridiculous, so he, Tex, and Tucker went to Red Base to attack them. Caboose stayed with Sheila, who was still transferring to the crashed Pelican, and Doc, Sister, and the alien baby were sent into the caves. This brought them right into the others' trap, as they soon encountered the possessed Captain Flowers and the alien working with him and were captured.
Meanwhile, Church, Tex, and Tucker were attacked by Wyoming at Red Base. He used his time distortion unit to gain an advantage in the battle, but Tucker's sword made him immune to the time distortion, and he was able to use that fact to help the group get the jump on Wyoming and ultimately kill him. Unfortunately, Wyoming had time to explain his master plan to Tex about how they would be able to use O'Malley to defeat the alien race, and Tex realized that she had to help. She got on her radio so O'Malley could go into her. After a mess of possessions of most of the Reds and Blues and Doc while trying to find Tex (and the second death of Captain Flowers), O'Malley made it into Tex. She boarded the Pelican with Wyoming's helmet and Tucker's alien child in tow. To make sure she couldn't escape, the Reds had already put Andy the bomb on the ship, and Sarge ordered him to detonate. The ship exploded, the wreckage landing far from Blood Gulch. Everyone went back to their bases, and Blood Gulch was soon declared obsolete and the personnel transferred. Doc himself had left before this, going back to his usual medical duties on various bases.
Doc did not get involved in the affairs of the Reds and Blues for a while after that--until he received a call from Command that he needed to go to Zanzibar to help an injured soldier (Caboose). By the time he arrived, however, no one was there. Command, having no other use for Doc, left him there to wait for the group to return. They did pass through a while later, but Doc didn't quite catch them before they were gone.
During this interlude, almost all of the Freelancer AIs were destroyed by an EMP, the Freelancer program was disbanded, and the UNSC took over command of their simulation soldiers. However, they left the situation at status quo, and Doc remained where he was. Thoroughly annoyed at being left alone at Zanzibar for ages, Doc was overjoyed when he finally received a call from his new Command, sending him to help an injured soldier at the outpost Valhalla. Unfortunately for Doc, this call was a trap. He arrived to find Simmons there and eagerly greeted him, but Simmons was visibly upset. It turned out he was being held prisoner by the former Freelancers Agent Washington and the Meta, who knocked Doc out and took him prisoner, too.
Canon Point: Season 8 (Revelation), Episode 1, just after being knocked out by the Meta.
Reality Description: While Red vs. Blue is a spin-off of the Halo-verse, it actually has few direct connections with the games. The canon itself revolves around a Great War, which is never described in detail, but is between the humans and a race of aliens with a intense fixation on technology as religious artifacts. This war ends between Seasons 5 and 6, i.e. after Doc leaves Blood Gulch and Tex takes the ship that Andy the bomb blows up.
In the desperate climate of the war, the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) commissioned a number of experimental initiatives to give the humans a leg up in the war. One of these was the Freelancer program, which was a team of elite agents. Each of these Freelancers received extensive training and an armor enhancement, giving them a variety of abilities such as cloaking, the ability to create a shield, healing, speed, etc. Later in the program, these Freelancers were also implanted with experimental AI, which served both to control their armor enhancements and to give them advice and improve their performance in battle. The program, however, was only able to obtain one AI--the Alpha AI--to work with. In order to have enough AI to run the tests that they wanted to, the program's Director and his closest aide, the Counselor, tortured the Alpha AI with no-win scenarios in order to break its mind, much as a human mind fragments under intense stress and can create conditions like a multiple personality disorder. In the case of the Alpha, different aspects of it broke off, creating AI fragments. These fragments personified parts of the Alpha. For example, Delta was its logic, Epsilon its memories, Omega its rage, and Gamma its deceit. Different Freelancer agents were implanted with the AI fragments.
These Freelancers, however, represented the army's brightest and best. Soldiers who came into the army with low test scores and awful field skills, like Doc, were placed in the Red and Blue Armies--human armies made to fight a fake civil war at various outposts, whose true purpose was really just to serve as training for the Freelancers. After being kicked out of the Red Army, Doc became a neutral medic, but he continued to be confined to acting as a medical officer for the soldiers at these training outposts. Even after the Freelancer program was disbanded by the UNSC, Doc's duties did not change; his Command simply changed from being Freelancer Command to being Command at the UNSC. At this time, he is overseen by the UNSC.
Currently, Doc is at Freelancer Program Simulation Outpost 17: Valhalla. Valhalla looks like so. It is, for the most part, a rocky green field among cliffs, and it has a Red Base on one end, near the river, and a Blue Base on the other with a waterfall behind it. The crashed and abandoned remains of Tex's ship, a Pelican, can also be found there. Screenshots of the area can be found here, generously provided by the wonderfulvampydirector.
With Doc at Outpost 17 are Simmons of the Red Army and the former Freelancers Agent Washington and the Meta, who was once Agent Maine.
Private Dick Simmons wears maroon armor. He is a workaholic and a computer geek who puts his best effort into everything and is forever seeking validation and appreciation (that he will probably never receive) from his Sargeant, Sarge. At the moment, he is being held prisoner by Agent Washington and the Meta because they want to find the other Reds and Caboose, who has the Epsilon AI--a rare commodity after most of the AI fragments were destroyed by an EMP.
Agent Washington wears steel armor with yellow trim. Once an enthusiastic idealist, life has treated him badly, and at this point, he is willing to do whatever it takes to be free of the Freelancer program--including attacking and killing former allies in order to steal the Epsilon AI and turn it over to the Chairman of the UNSC's Oversight Subcommittee. In exchange for the Chairman's promise of freedom, he is running the operation to retrieve Epsilon, although he knows the Meta is not the most reliable subordinate.
The Meta, formerly Agent Maine, is probably insane. He went rogue and attacked and killed other Freelancers, collecting quite a few AI fragments for himself, as well as the agents' armor enhancements. Having so many AI fragments in his head likely compromised his sanity on its own. Even worse, those AI were destroyed, costing him a lot of power and leaving him with a huge quantity of armor enhancements that he is still using even though he no longer has proper control over them. These circumstances have resulted in an insane brute of a man who has no qualms with rampant violence and only works toward his own goals. Due to a previous throat injury, the Meta is not able to talk; he can only produce growling sounds, which Agent Washington is able to understand as words, but Doc is not. He is the main force deterring Doc and Simmons from making any attempts to escape. He is also the reason Agent Washington had Simmons call a medic to Valhalla to begin with, as Wash is concerned by his erratic behavior and the effects that his experience with so many AI may be having on his mental state.
Until something in Doc's life changes, he and Simmons are prisoners together at Red Base under Wash and the Meta's close observation.
Player LJ:
kmegumi2Email and/or AIM: kmegumi2@yahoo.com
Timezone: CST
Other Characters: Oliver Day (
oliverplus) and DI Patricia Menzies (grip_on_reality)Character: Medical Officer Frank DuFresne (Doc)
Series: Red vs. Blue
Deviance: 1
Age: ~30 years
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Canon Used: Seasons 1-8 (primarily 2-5, 8).
Appearance: Doc is typically found in a full suit of purple combat armor, as seen here and here. It will take a real force of will to convince him it's safe enough to be without it. He carries a medical scanner that looks like so.
Psychology: Doc has always been drawn to working with other people. He thrives on being part of a team, which is his only real goal in life. Because of this, he has a tendency to latch onto the goals of whoever happens to be nearby and attempt to assist them in any way he can. Despite his morals of pacifism and non-discrimination, if he ends up on a team with someone who is out to hurt or kill people, he's quite happy to go along with them, protesting their plans all the while, but showing no real resistence. Being part of a team is being part of a team, after all!
Unfortunately, being the incapable person that he is, his help for others isn't usually very effective. Because this leads to frequent rejections, Doc has become extremely resilient over the years. When a goal goes wrong, he turns around and latches onto someone else without even missing a beat.
One ideal that Doc does hold for himself is that he is a pacifist. He dislikes conflict and disorder on the whole, especially as he has a tendency to end up on the losing end of it, and he also very much dislikes being in danger, so pacifism seems like a great way to avoid all those problems at once. Oddly enough, he finds himself drawn to violence and war, so he has compensated for his own contradictions by joining the army as a conscientious objector and becoming a medic. As Doc is usually very flexible in his goals and decisions, this seems like a natural solution, and he's quite happy with his current path in life.
Recently, Doc's manner has changed because of his possession by the megalomaniacal AI Omega (O'Malley). O'Malley used Doc's body to forward his plans to either destroy or conquer the universe (he never seemed quite sure which), and Doc, being weak-willed and lacking convictions, had almost no control while O'Malley was in his mind. During the possession, Doc made very few decisions about his life. Being Doc, he didn't mind O'Malley's use of his body enough to do anything about it other than whine now and then that O'Malley shouldn't hurt or kill people. Having O'Malley in his head had psychological effects, however, bringing out Doc's inner fascination with violence and seeping into his personality a touch. Over the course of the possession, Doc's manner became sharper, and he has started to use a little foul language--though mostly under his breath and when he doesn't expect to be heard.
Doc is eternally practical--sometimes overly so. Not even possession by a psychopath can stop his practicality. Doc always keeps health considerations in mind, such as stress levels and mental health. He is practical in other ways, as well, and is even mindful of Feng Shui and resale value when he and O'Malley are setting up an evil lair. Arguably, since the point of the evil lair is to destroy the world, resale value shouldn't be an issue, but you can't be too careful, can you?
One last major aspect of Doc's personality is that he is a coward. To him, self-preservation is just as important a value as pacifism, and he will not hesitate to run and hide in a dangerous situation, as long as he feels he can do so safely. Though he won't admit it, most of his adherence to pacifism is based on its ability to be a good excuse in the face of battle. He is not noble, brave, or clever, but he knows how to run and hide, and that's a skill that has served him well in life.
Other Skills/Abilities: Doc is a decent runner; he even lettered in track in high school. Between his attempt at medical school and his position as a medic, he has had some medical training and knows how to interpret some of the readings he sees from his medical scanner. He has had related stress management training as well. Some more notable talents are that he is good at yoga and knowledgeable about Feng Shui.
Other Weaknesses: Doc has few reliable medical abilities, and unfortunately, his job is to be a full-fledged medic. Otherwise, Doc is human, and while his armor acts as protection from a lot of physical dangers, he still has all the normal human vulnerabilities underneath. For example, bullets can pierce his armor, though it does offer some degree of protection. His mental defenses are also nothing to write home about; he is easily susceptible to the influences of other mental constructs (like an AI). Finally, he can't throw well. At all. Seriously, you don't want to see him try.
History: A pacifist and an aspiring doctor, Doc started on his main path in life when he went to medical school at Jamaica State. Unfortunately for Doc, he swiftly failed out, but undeterred, he resolved to become a medic instead. Despite his pacifism, he joined the army--as a conscientious objector, of course. Once he had signed up and been tested, his lack of qualifications and field abilities led to his placement in the Red Army at one of the simulation outposts used to train Freelancer agents. However, as Doc refused to fight, the Red Army's leadership decided to get rid of him. Unfortunately for them, Blue Army wouldn't take him either. Eventually, the two armies compromised by making Doc a neutral medic working for both sides of the conflict. Doc was content with the result.
For a while, Doc's life followed a standard pattern of performing horribly at medical training, visiting injured soldiers, and performing horribly at helping them. This monotonous life, however, changed when Doc was sent to Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha to help the injured Freelancer Tex. She had been working for the Blue Team, so he was sent to them first. After helping Tex, Doc's next objective was to medically assist, as needed, the other soldiers on both the Red and Blue sides. Unfortunately, as it took Doc three months to arrive, Tex had long since died by the time he reached Blue Base (or, at least, her body had; she would reappear later, apparently as a ghost). Tucker, Church, and Caboose showed Doc the graves--one for Tex and one for Church, and Caboose attempted to explain how Church had died and then come back seemingly as a ghost and taken over the body of a Mexican robot (Lopez, from the Red Team).
Since he couldn't give Tex any medical help, Doc moved on to the next part of his mission. However, it took another unfortunate turn when, just as he finished checking the vitals of the Blue Team members, they were attacked by the Reds. Doc refused to help in the fight, so Church shot Caboose in the foot to convince him to get involved. Doc, using his superior medical skills, rubbed Caboose's neck with aloe vera. Caboose was fine afterwards, although his toe fell off. By this time, the Blues had decided Doc was quite useless. Meanwhile, the Reds ran out of ammo, and they offered the Blues a chance to surrender in an attempt to hide their mistake. The Blues then offered Doc to the Reds as a "Blue" hostage, not telling them that Doc was supposedly neutral and needed to go to their base to scan them anyway.
At Red Base, Doc was held as a prisoner because everyone believed him to be a Blue. Grif was set to guard Doc. They chatted at first, but Doc tried to ingratiate himself to the other Reds by telling them that he and Grif were not friends since it was obvious that none of the others liked Grif. Having severed his only possible connection to that team, Doc was apparently going to be their prisoner indefinitely--until Church, using the robot Lopez's body, accidentally remotely activated the Red Team's jeep. The jeep ran into Doc, knocking him into the driver's seat and driving off with him--and then bringing him back and pinning the Red's Sargeant, Sarge, into a wall. The jeep's machine gun then came online and very nearly killed him before Church lost the remote connection. After that, Doc attempted to back up the jeep to free Sarge, except in his panic, he slammed it forward into Sarge twice by accident.
The Reds, completely fed up with Doc, forced him to get out of the jeep and marched him back to Blue Base, where they tried to give him back to the Blues. Suspicious that this was some sort of trick, the Blues refused. The Reds wouldn't take him back to their base either; Grif even threw Doc's own words back at him about not associating with people who aren't popular. Doc was left alone in the middle of the canyon. With nowhere left to go, he retreated to the canyon's caves. There, he tried to contact Command. Unfortunately for Doc, when Vic at Command heard that Doc not only hadn't completed his mission but had even managed to alienate everyone in the canyon, he refused to take him back until he made some friends. With no way to leave the canyon, Doc was forced to live in the caves. Doc continued his solitary life in the caves until he stumbled upon a strange purple relic that he thought was an alien artifact, which was really a vehicle known as a Ghost. He radioed Command about it.
At the same time, the Blues were working to kill O'Malley (Omega), a malevolent experimental AI from the Freelancer program that had been assigned to Tex. O'Malley had the ability to use radios to jump from one host to another, and just before Tex's injury and death, he had jumped into the mind of Caboose, another Blue soldier, to save himself. In order to kill him once and for all, the "ghosts" Church and Tex jumped into Caboose's mind, forcing O'Malley out of him while the Blues' other soldier, Tucker, with the help of a singing Lopez, got all the Reds to shut off their helmet radios. Their plan was thwarted when O'Malley used his radio-traveling ability to reach the only person in the canyon with a radio that was still on--Doc, calling Command. Doc was shocked at first to find himself suddenly making horribly violent declarations. He even threatened to eat Vic's children! After Doc found that even yoga didn't solve the problem, he spent a while feeling extremely confused and frightened of himself.
Still stranded in the cave, but now with O'Malley in his mind, Doc and O'Malley eventually came to an understanding and began to work together toward O'Malley's plan to either conquer or destroy the universe (Or perhaps both. He was never entirely clear). O'Malley was in near-complete control of Doc's body from this point, and Doc proceeded to be mainly along for the ride, although he did protest O'Malley's planned violence every once in a while.
Riding the Ghost, Doc/O'Malley flew into a battle between the Reds and Blues, where O'Malley apparently shot Tucker with a rocket launcher. (Some time-travel hijincks make his responsibility questionable, but he had a rocket launcher ready to fire at everyone, at least.) He seized the Reds' robot Lopez, and he Lopez together fled through the Red Team's teleporter, ending up on the snowy outpost Sidewinder.
At that point, O'Malley's plan led to the Reds and Blues joining forces because the Reds needed Lopez back for the secret plans hidden within him and the Blues wanted Doc back so he could help the injured Tucker. Everyone except Donut from the Reds and Sheila, the Blues' tank, followed O'Malley through the teleporter. As part of a deal, the Reds had built two robotic bodies, one of which Church was now possessing. The other was possessed by Tex immediately after the group went through the teleporter, and she soon followed them. The Reds and Blues, thrown into various places by the teleporter, struggled to reunite. This involved activating the secret microphone in one of Sarge's robot bodies, which Tex was possessing. Unfortunately, Caboose pressed the button to activate the other robot--Church's--which contained a 10 megaton bomb.
Meanwhile, O'Malley/Doc expanded their evil plans. O'Malley teamed up with Vic from Command to hire the Freelancer Wyoming to take out Tucker, who had discovered that Vic was acting as Command for both the Red and Blue sides. While Wyoming didn't manage to kill Tucker, he did capture Tex, preventing her from meddling in their plans. And as it turned out, O'Malley had brought everyone together on purpose so that he could activate Lopez's weather control device, which he had adjusted in order to cause ridiculous amounts of destruction, and unleash it on them.
When everyone came together on Sidewinder and O'Malley activated the device, he had to fight the group as it warmed up. While he was attacking with the rocket launcher, the Reds' soldier Simmons used the teleporter to bring a bunch of Grunts--multiplayer soldiers--from another area to Sidewinder. He fooled them with a claim that O'Malley had their flag, leading them to attack and ultimately defeat him, although Doc wasn't killed--he was only injured. The Reds and Blues attempted to disarm the bomb in Church's robotic body in the meantime, but a lightning bolt caused by Lopez' weather device fused the detonator. In the end, the bomb went off, and everyone, including O'Malley, was blown in a variety of directions.
After the explosion, O'Malley found Lopez's head, which was apparently all that remained of him after the blast. He carried him until they reached the abandoned base on Zanzibar, which he decided to set up as his evil lair in preparation for a new plan to take over (or destroy) the universe. O'Malley also set up a secret laboratory nearby. He ignored Doc's protests about wanting to inspect the place before they decided to live there, but Doc was at least comforted that, according to Feng Shui, it was 88% good luck--and it had a computer for him to work on his blog. Unexpectedly, one of the Red Grunts was blown near Zanzibar by the explosion, and O'Malley recruited him as a minion. Doc got to hang motivational posters in the living room in return.
O'Malley also caught sight of someone watching him--Tex--but she swiftly disappeared. She sent out a radio signal to let the others know where O'Malley's base was, and they all gathered at Zanzibar. Tex outlined her plan for them to break into the fortress and plant a bomb to destroy it. Meanwhile, the Red Grunt spotted the group on the beach and let O'Malley know about them. A battle ensued, during which Tucker fell through into a secret hold below Zanzibar's windmill and found a special weapon--an energy sword. He then rejoined the group in the main building, discovering that, unfortunately, bringing the sword into it caused the building to lock down. Even worse, they had Tex's bomb with them, which was on a countdown they had no way of stopping.
Thankfully, Church, who had been sent into the past during the explosion, made it back in time to activate the computer, Gary, whom he had met in the past (and who would turn out to be Wyoming's AI, Gamma, who actually had a time distortion unit). Gary stopped the countdown on the bomb.
O'Malley escaped with Lopez's head and began engineering new plans. He had Lopez build a robot army to kill them all. Lopez took "day of victory" literally, however, and made his robot army move extremely slowly. Then Donut managed to steal O'Malley's Ghost while he was arguing with Lopez. Worst of all, an alien arrived and began decimating O'Malley's army, even attacking O'Malley and Lopez.
The alien also attacked Church, scaring him right out of his body, and Tex went after it and lost her body, too. Caboose, however, befriended it, allowing the others to get their bodies back. When the alien saw Tucker's sword, though, it immediately attacked him viciously. Unbeknownst to everyone, it was impregnating him. The sword was tied to the DNA of the first creature to retrieve it, so the alien needed Tucker to have a human/alien hybrid baby that would then claim the sword for the aliens.
After some awkward attempts at conversation, Tex discovered that her bomb, Andy, could serve as a translator for the alien, and it told Tucker that, because he had the sword, he had to go on a quest that required it. Caboose, Andy, and Tex went with him. At the end of the quest, the alien tried to take the prize--another vehicle, a Banshee, but Wyoming had caught up with them, and he immediately destroyed the Banshee and the alien. Tex went after Wyoming, but Tucker and Caboose (with Andy) returned to Blood Gulch, joining Church and the Reds, who were there already. By this time, Tucker was ill, but no one knew what was causing his illness. Andy suggested they call a doctor, so Church did just that--he called Doc, still possessed by O'Malley, and asked him to come examine Tucker. O'Malley came to their base, bringing Lopez with him as a lookout. He examined Tucker and diagnosed him with pregnancy. Even though Church didn't believe him, Doc decided he would help Tucker give birth.
Meanwhile, the Reds found Lopez and stole Andy the bomb so that he could translate the secret plans stored in Lopez's head in Spanish. Church took the tank, Sheila, and went after Andy, leaving Caboose at the base with Doc and Tucker, who went into labor. Doc helped to deliver Tucker's alien baby. At the same time, the Reds used the radio to call Command, and O'Malley left Doc. Caboose radioed Church to tell him, and generally too many people used the radio in that span of time for anyone to be sure whom O'Malley had gone to.
Tucker fell into a brief coma after the birth of the baby, and Caboose donated some blood to it at Doc's request. Church was determined to kill the baby, but Doc refused to let him into the base. Church was distracted then when a ship crashed on top of the Red soldier Donut. It turned out to be carrying Grif's sister, who had joined the army. Since she was color blind, she had joined the Blue Army rather than the Red Army like Grif. When the Reds figured this out, they decided to send her to the Blue side. Doc, who was mostly acting as a baby-sitter for Tucker's baby at this point, gave the new recruit a physical.
Before that, Church had sent Doc to speak to their tank, Sheila, who was acting erratic. They were suspicious that O'Malley was in her. Doc was only able to confirm that she was acting oddly. So Tex, Church, and Caboose came up with a plan in which Caboose distracted Sheila until Tex could take her offline. Just as she was being taken offline, however, she revealed that she knew where O'Malley had gone. To bring her back online, they transferred her AI from the tank into Sister's ship, a Pelican. Tex also told Church that Wyoming had disappeared after she had captured him, at which point Church discovered that the computer, Gary, had actually been Wyoming's AI, Gamma, manipulating them all along.
Meanwhile, the Reds had discovered a system of caves under their bases, which Donut had fallen into when the ship had crashed on him. These caves turned out to hold a surveillance station, manned by the AI Vic. He had spent all this time acting as Red and Blue Command to Blood Gulch when he was actually watching both sides from underneath the canyon. In reality, Vic, Andy, Wyoming, O'Malley, and the aliens were engineering an elaborate plot. The aliens meant to use Tucker's part-alien child to steal the sword, and O'Malley had agreed to help them, but what he really wanted was to possess that baby so that he could go back to the aliens' homeworld and destroy them all. This would have ended the Freelancers' war, so Wyoming was glad to help. Andy became involved as a translator between O'Malley and the aliens. The aliens had resurrected the corpse of the Blues' previous leader, Captain Flowers, for O'Malley to possess, which was why he had left Doc.
Knowing that the Reds were in the caves, Vic called the Blues, telling them to attack the Reds and recommending they come at them through the caves. Church thought that sounded ridiculous, so he, Tex, and Tucker went to Red Base to attack them. Caboose stayed with Sheila, who was still transferring to the crashed Pelican, and Doc, Sister, and the alien baby were sent into the caves. This brought them right into the others' trap, as they soon encountered the possessed Captain Flowers and the alien working with him and were captured.
Meanwhile, Church, Tex, and Tucker were attacked by Wyoming at Red Base. He used his time distortion unit to gain an advantage in the battle, but Tucker's sword made him immune to the time distortion, and he was able to use that fact to help the group get the jump on Wyoming and ultimately kill him. Unfortunately, Wyoming had time to explain his master plan to Tex about how they would be able to use O'Malley to defeat the alien race, and Tex realized that she had to help. She got on her radio so O'Malley could go into her. After a mess of possessions of most of the Reds and Blues and Doc while trying to find Tex (and the second death of Captain Flowers), O'Malley made it into Tex. She boarded the Pelican with Wyoming's helmet and Tucker's alien child in tow. To make sure she couldn't escape, the Reds had already put Andy the bomb on the ship, and Sarge ordered him to detonate. The ship exploded, the wreckage landing far from Blood Gulch. Everyone went back to their bases, and Blood Gulch was soon declared obsolete and the personnel transferred. Doc himself had left before this, going back to his usual medical duties on various bases.
Doc did not get involved in the affairs of the Reds and Blues for a while after that--until he received a call from Command that he needed to go to Zanzibar to help an injured soldier (Caboose). By the time he arrived, however, no one was there. Command, having no other use for Doc, left him there to wait for the group to return. They did pass through a while later, but Doc didn't quite catch them before they were gone.
During this interlude, almost all of the Freelancer AIs were destroyed by an EMP, the Freelancer program was disbanded, and the UNSC took over command of their simulation soldiers. However, they left the situation at status quo, and Doc remained where he was. Thoroughly annoyed at being left alone at Zanzibar for ages, Doc was overjoyed when he finally received a call from his new Command, sending him to help an injured soldier at the outpost Valhalla. Unfortunately for Doc, this call was a trap. He arrived to find Simmons there and eagerly greeted him, but Simmons was visibly upset. It turned out he was being held prisoner by the former Freelancers Agent Washington and the Meta, who knocked Doc out and took him prisoner, too.
Canon Point: Season 8 (Revelation), Episode 1, just after being knocked out by the Meta.
Reality Description: While Red vs. Blue is a spin-off of the Halo-verse, it actually has few direct connections with the games. The canon itself revolves around a Great War, which is never described in detail, but is between the humans and a race of aliens with a intense fixation on technology as religious artifacts. This war ends between Seasons 5 and 6, i.e. after Doc leaves Blood Gulch and Tex takes the ship that Andy the bomb blows up.
In the desperate climate of the war, the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) commissioned a number of experimental initiatives to give the humans a leg up in the war. One of these was the Freelancer program, which was a team of elite agents. Each of these Freelancers received extensive training and an armor enhancement, giving them a variety of abilities such as cloaking, the ability to create a shield, healing, speed, etc. Later in the program, these Freelancers were also implanted with experimental AI, which served both to control their armor enhancements and to give them advice and improve their performance in battle. The program, however, was only able to obtain one AI--the Alpha AI--to work with. In order to have enough AI to run the tests that they wanted to, the program's Director and his closest aide, the Counselor, tortured the Alpha AI with no-win scenarios in order to break its mind, much as a human mind fragments under intense stress and can create conditions like a multiple personality disorder. In the case of the Alpha, different aspects of it broke off, creating AI fragments. These fragments personified parts of the Alpha. For example, Delta was its logic, Epsilon its memories, Omega its rage, and Gamma its deceit. Different Freelancer agents were implanted with the AI fragments.
These Freelancers, however, represented the army's brightest and best. Soldiers who came into the army with low test scores and awful field skills, like Doc, were placed in the Red and Blue Armies--human armies made to fight a fake civil war at various outposts, whose true purpose was really just to serve as training for the Freelancers. After being kicked out of the Red Army, Doc became a neutral medic, but he continued to be confined to acting as a medical officer for the soldiers at these training outposts. Even after the Freelancer program was disbanded by the UNSC, Doc's duties did not change; his Command simply changed from being Freelancer Command to being Command at the UNSC. At this time, he is overseen by the UNSC.
Currently, Doc is at Freelancer Program Simulation Outpost 17: Valhalla. Valhalla looks like so. It is, for the most part, a rocky green field among cliffs, and it has a Red Base on one end, near the river, and a Blue Base on the other with a waterfall behind it. The crashed and abandoned remains of Tex's ship, a Pelican, can also be found there. Screenshots of the area can be found here, generously provided by the wonderful
vampydirector.With Doc at Outpost 17 are Simmons of the Red Army and the former Freelancers Agent Washington and the Meta, who was once Agent Maine.
Private Dick Simmons wears maroon armor. He is a workaholic and a computer geek who puts his best effort into everything and is forever seeking validation and appreciation (that he will probably never receive) from his Sargeant, Sarge. At the moment, he is being held prisoner by Agent Washington and the Meta because they want to find the other Reds and Caboose, who has the Epsilon AI--a rare commodity after most of the AI fragments were destroyed by an EMP.
Agent Washington wears steel armor with yellow trim. Once an enthusiastic idealist, life has treated him badly, and at this point, he is willing to do whatever it takes to be free of the Freelancer program--including attacking and killing former allies in order to steal the Epsilon AI and turn it over to the Chairman of the UNSC's Oversight Subcommittee. In exchange for the Chairman's promise of freedom, he is running the operation to retrieve Epsilon, although he knows the Meta is not the most reliable subordinate.
The Meta, formerly Agent Maine, is probably insane. He went rogue and attacked and killed other Freelancers, collecting quite a few AI fragments for himself, as well as the agents' armor enhancements. Having so many AI fragments in his head likely compromised his sanity on its own. Even worse, those AI were destroyed, costing him a lot of power and leaving him with a huge quantity of armor enhancements that he is still using even though he no longer has proper control over them. These circumstances have resulted in an insane brute of a man who has no qualms with rampant violence and only works toward his own goals. Due to a previous throat injury, the Meta is not able to talk; he can only produce growling sounds, which Agent Washington is able to understand as words, but Doc is not. He is the main force deterring Doc and Simmons from making any attempts to escape. He is also the reason Agent Washington had Simmons call a medic to Valhalla to begin with, as Wash is concerned by his erratic behavior and the effects that his experience with so many AI may be having on his mental state.
Until something in Doc's life changes, he and Simmons are prisoners together at Red Base under Wash and the Meta's close observation.