DS Louise Gardiner (AU) [Ashes To Ashes (BBC)] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
doomed_copper) wrote2016-06-14 07:53 pm
doomed_copper) wrote2016-06-14 07:53 pm
Illyria Application, Rough Draft
Player Name: Jen
Player Age: 41
Character Name: Detective Sergeant Louise Gardiner
Character Age: Early-to-middle 30s. Given her time travel experience, she won't have aged to 43 as yet.
Inventory: She will be arriving in Sick Bay from being on the job in the field, so she will be wearing a charcoal grey three-piece suit with a starched white blouse and silver cufflinks, along with black court shoes. No jewelry, though there are hairpins securing her bun at the nape of her neck. She carries a double shoulder holster underneath her blazer, and in it is one police-issue Glock 47, and in the other is a vintage .380 Beretta Cheetah that was her father's, given to her as a gift by her mother upon graduating from Hendon Police College. The inner pocket of her blazer contains both her warrant card and a small silver flask filled with single malt scotch. As she will be coming from active duty, she will not have her handbag, nor her briefcase with her.
Character Appearance: Louise is about 5'3", 125 lbs., with pale, ivory skin, clear, aquamarine eyes and shoulder-length, reddish-auburn hair. Although diminutive in height, she more than makes up for it in brawn; she has a lean, toned, lightly-defined muscle build. Her PB is Zoe Telford. please link a full-body image if available.
History: Louise Gardiner was born on 7 January 1973, to Rose and Clive Gardiner in Chadwell Heath, Dagenham, Essex, just outside the greater London proper. Rose was a stay-at-home mum, having only done clerical work prior to Louise's birth; Louise was an only child. Clive was a police constable for the Dagenham & Barking branch of the London Metropolitan Police Force and provided a working-class, yet decent living for his family; as such, they lived in a small, but very nice terraced house and not in a government-run council estate. Louise admired her father very much, and from an early age desired to be a copper like him, despite her mother's misgivings. Most of this was rooted in the deep and realistic anxiety she had about losing her family whilst they were out in the field, and so, Rose encouraged Louise as soon as she entered college to think about getting a degree at university; it was her firm view that her daughter have a 'backup plan'.
However, Rose's anxieties unfortunately came true; when Louise was aged 14, Clive was killed whilst on duty helping to foil a jewelry blag gone wrong. It was July of 1987, and, much to the dismay of her mother, this event only girded Louise's desire to become an officer all the more. But, wanting to please her mum at the same time, Louise did attend university at City College of London, earning a 2:1 in criminology, and after all was said and done, she enrolled at Hendon and, soon after, completed her training and becoming a WPC (woman police constable) in December of 1996. After a few years, going from traffic warden to apprehending criminals, Louise made up her mind she was ready to join CID (Criminal Investigations Division). But, the excitement of her ambition was short-lived.
At the same time she was keeping her head down and working as hard as she could, Louise became involved romantically and sexually with her Detective Inspector and superior officer. Although it was mostly not discussed around the station for professional reasons, it was an ‘understood’ matter among their colleagues. At first, her mother was overjoyed that Louise had finally found someone stable; the mere fact that they’d dated for a year was enough, as this was the longest relationship that Louise had ever been in to date. However, there was always something her mother didn’t quite ‘like’ about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Louise would get exasperated any time her mother would mention anything, so she remained silent and consoled herself with the fact that she should just be happy Louise was even in a serious relationship. Ultimately, her fears were realized when Louise became suspicious that her partner was being unfaithful to her after his habits became irregular and he seemed to become somewhat distant. While he was in the shower one morning, she checked his mobile phone logs and discovered calls upon calls to another female officer in the department Louise was acquainted with. After a long confrontation, he admitted the affair and said he was in love with the other woman, thereby ending his relationship with Louise. That evening, she barricaded herself in her flat, a heavy bureau blocking her door, and overdosed on lorazepam, the Millennium New Year’s Eve broadcast on BBC1 playing on the TV screen behind her. The last sound Louise heard was the wailing of the fire lorry coming to attempt to rescue her outside her tower block, and this marked the first downfall, the first demise she would experience because of her weakness due to a man in her life. It was 31 December 1999.
Louise woke up on the side of a motorway seemingly only scant seconds later, both dazed and confused as to where she was, absolutely no memory of what she'd done to herself the night before. Upon rising, she looked round herself, recognising virtually nothing, save for the cars whizzing by--they seemed smaller...outdated, even. But when Louise turned to the back, she could make out the London skyline...but half of it seemed to be missing. Her stomach roiling, she spotted an abandoned vehicle on the shoulder and walked up to it; upon catching her reflection in the passenger side window, she screamed in fright: her clothing, hair, and makeup were nearly 20 years out of date. Peering closer, Louise could make out the edges of a newspaper, The Independent; the headline read "ARGENTINA INVADES FALKLANDS". The date? 2 April, 1982. She fished into the inner pocket of her khaki-coloured mackintosh, and drew out her warrant card: her name was on it, and the rank she'd wanted so long was listed underneath it. "DETECTIVE CONSTABLE LOUISE GARDINER, WARRANT NO. 082774", it read, with her scrawled signature beneath, issued 1 January of the same year.
Utterly confused, heartbroken, and discombobulated, Louise wandered off to the division that had been listed as hers: Hanfield Branch, and in the weeks and months that followed, the young woman was unable to convince her DCI there had been some grave mistake, that she wasn't supposed to be there, that her branch was back on the other side of the city, that she never signed her name to that warrant card. She was laughed off, and especially by her fellow detectives when she mentioned she'd come from a point far into the future; 'H.G. Wells', they'd nicknamed her, and the only reason she never was sectioned for her behaviour was from her razor-sharp inclinations whilst on a case. Soon, she fell into duty, the time beginning to strip the old identity from her, dispersing it from her head and into the ether, and before long, Louise failed to remember her old life, never realising she was, along with everyone else, trapped within a kind of 'copper's limbo', meant for the souls of officers who'd met violent or untimely ends to sort themselves before becoming truly ready to move on.
Nevertheless, upon seeing her incisive skills in the field, her DCI, Terry Wilson, sent her on an undercover mission to retrieve intel about a former drug lord who he suspected was trying to rebuild his former cartel along with his son. Eager to impress her boss and secure a promotion to sergeant, Louise jumped in with both feet. But, DCI Wilson, unused to managing a female DC in this sort of work (it being the 80s, and still very much a man's work), left her to mostly fend for herself over a period of six months, no backup. Suddenly faced with a sense of disillusionment over her career, paired with an innate, fight-or-flight sense of self-preservation, eventually Louise stopped 'calling home', as it were, and found herself ingratiating her soul to the father-and-son team of heroin runners in an effort to stay alive.
As Stockholm Syndrome set in, Louise was no match for the evil that was the son. A sadistic criminal who exhibited antisocial and psychopathic behavior (mainly attributed to the amount of cocaine and other drugs consumed over the years as a result of his involvement with various cartels), he had a misogynistic view of women and enjoyed degrading and demoralizing them through both physical and emotional abuse. Louise’s feelings of duty overshadowed any common sense she may have had, especially as she was keen to impress her DCI in order to secure at least a hope of promotion in the near future. She allowed him to commit unspeakable acts of sexual aberration in the name of that duty, all of which would come back upon her again and again. Flashes of blood, the blade of a knife, torn clothing, being forced to perform in ways which caused her pain and demoralization.
On the other hand, Louise was also no match for the charms of the father. He treated her well, was protective, and showed her respect that most of her prior attachments hadn’t; certainly her own DCI didn’t show her compassion—he’d left her there to face horror without backup, alienated and alone. And to her detriment, Louise always possessed a sense of follow-through and responsibility, something she attributed to her upbringing, so she carried on, still somewhat confident she could pull through. In the end, her cover blown by another branch investigating crimes committed by the same gang, Louise was hit by a green van driven by the son in an attempt to flee the scene, and she died in a dank puddle as an overcast, grey sky drizzled rain upon her, her fellow officers having arrived on the scene and looking upon her, inner shame evident in their eyes.
In the last seconds, as blood trickled down her cheek and onto her blouse, the scenes from both lives played out in her dying brain side by side, as though coexisting, and just as she passed, Louise remembered, but it was too late. She was gone, her 'second chance' to make right having seemingly slipped away, the wailing of ambulance sirens ringing in her fading auditory pathways.
Louise would wake once more, one final time, the universe seeming to recognise the unfair terms by which she was released from the last go. This time, she landed in present-day London as a detective sergeant with Scotland Yard's homicide division, her prior knowledge and experience leading her to keep quiet about her past and finally attempt to right the wrongs she'd committed or endured in an effort to 'graduate' and move on to the heavenly realm, which is where I will be taking her into the game.
Canon Point: Louise will arrive in Sick Bay directly following being knocked out as she sprinted after a runaway shooter and his accomplice ambushing her from the side with the butt of his pistol.
Personality: Louise Gardiner was, and perhaps still is to some extent, a tragic person. Probably too sensitive and/or vulnerable to emotional manipulation, she should have picked a different career path. However, that very sensibility is what drew her to policing, that feeling of wanting to make a difference. She continues to have deep empathy for others and probably has felt that her life up to this point has had little meaning or real sense of purpose. Being in the business of helping save lives and put away for good the evil, she feels that in this way, she is redeeming all the poor qualities that she saw in herself. However, she still has a latent/default tendency to think too much concerning how others view her, and, worsening things, because of how she was treated by the Stafford father and son during her undercover mission, she suffered from extreme duality in how she then treated herself. Even though it wasn't her fault that the mission went south, she saw an inherent weakness in herself that she despised.
To expand on this more, in her canon, the father, was kind and loving to her as well as protective, and she was drawn to it as some hidden part of her felt she deserved to be treated well--harking back to another relationship in her past with a male that was positive: her father, before his death.
However, on the other hand, the sadistic son, Daniel, tapped into her negative feelings of self-worth, most likely encouraged by unchecked depression during that period, and this is evidenced in the destructive tendencies she displayed in becoming part of the cartel, becoming the sort of 'bent' copper she hated. Of course, the physical/mental abuse she suffered at the son's hands attacked her self-image; she felt that her body betrayed her in more ways than one. One, because she couldn't defend herself properly on her own (something she continued to blame herself for even when presented with the knowledge that any officer would need backup in these situations), and two, for even having been a WOMAN. She felt that her very physicality lent itself, at least partially, to being seen as prey--yet another "weakness" she perceived about herself.
The psychotic break/disillusionment she developed while undercover made her negative personality traits the worst they had ever been up to that point even as she maintained her sense of duty and accomplishment in seeing the undercover job through, and given the right circumstance, the PTSD and unhealthy behaviours she developed during her period undercover could resurface.
Moving forward in the friendship/relationship department, Louise had few friends and was/is known as somewhat of a loner, though she had been known for the odd night out with a few colleagues at the end of a particularly rough week on the job. However, Louise remains a very deep, emotional person although she can appear somewhat cool, aloof and steely at first glance. In the past, she'd eschewed most social gatherings and spent her free time curled up on the sofa or in a cafe, absorbed in either a book or in people watching with her headphones. The problem is simply that she will always be permanently altered by her failed undercover stint--it's part of who she is. However, it is worth noting that the right people or person could help lessen its intensity. and bring out the very best in her. In her past, she was reticent to give herself away, and remains this way to some extent, but compassion from another has allowed her to open up little by little, and the potential for her to develop a lasting friendship, and/or romantic relationship exists.
Supernatural Abilities: None; Louise is human.
Player Age: 41
Character Name: Detective Sergeant Louise Gardiner
Character Age: Early-to-middle 30s. Given her time travel experience, she won't have aged to 43 as yet.
Inventory: She will be arriving in Sick Bay from being on the job in the field, so she will be wearing a charcoal grey three-piece suit with a starched white blouse and silver cufflinks, along with black court shoes. No jewelry, though there are hairpins securing her bun at the nape of her neck. She carries a double shoulder holster underneath her blazer, and in it is one police-issue Glock 47, and in the other is a vintage .380 Beretta Cheetah that was her father's, given to her as a gift by her mother upon graduating from Hendon Police College. The inner pocket of her blazer contains both her warrant card and a small silver flask filled with single malt scotch. As she will be coming from active duty, she will not have her handbag, nor her briefcase with her.
Character Appearance: Louise is about 5'3", 125 lbs., with pale, ivory skin, clear, aquamarine eyes and shoulder-length, reddish-auburn hair. Although diminutive in height, she more than makes up for it in brawn; she has a lean, toned, lightly-defined muscle build. Her PB is Zoe Telford. please link a full-body image if available.
History: Louise Gardiner was born on 7 January 1973, to Rose and Clive Gardiner in Chadwell Heath, Dagenham, Essex, just outside the greater London proper. Rose was a stay-at-home mum, having only done clerical work prior to Louise's birth; Louise was an only child. Clive was a police constable for the Dagenham & Barking branch of the London Metropolitan Police Force and provided a working-class, yet decent living for his family; as such, they lived in a small, but very nice terraced house and not in a government-run council estate. Louise admired her father very much, and from an early age desired to be a copper like him, despite her mother's misgivings. Most of this was rooted in the deep and realistic anxiety she had about losing her family whilst they were out in the field, and so, Rose encouraged Louise as soon as she entered college to think about getting a degree at university; it was her firm view that her daughter have a 'backup plan'.
However, Rose's anxieties unfortunately came true; when Louise was aged 14, Clive was killed whilst on duty helping to foil a jewelry blag gone wrong. It was July of 1987, and, much to the dismay of her mother, this event only girded Louise's desire to become an officer all the more. But, wanting to please her mum at the same time, Louise did attend university at City College of London, earning a 2:1 in criminology, and after all was said and done, she enrolled at Hendon and, soon after, completed her training and becoming a WPC (woman police constable) in December of 1996. After a few years, going from traffic warden to apprehending criminals, Louise made up her mind she was ready to join CID (Criminal Investigations Division). But, the excitement of her ambition was short-lived.
At the same time she was keeping her head down and working as hard as she could, Louise became involved romantically and sexually with her Detective Inspector and superior officer. Although it was mostly not discussed around the station for professional reasons, it was an ‘understood’ matter among their colleagues. At first, her mother was overjoyed that Louise had finally found someone stable; the mere fact that they’d dated for a year was enough, as this was the longest relationship that Louise had ever been in to date. However, there was always something her mother didn’t quite ‘like’ about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Louise would get exasperated any time her mother would mention anything, so she remained silent and consoled herself with the fact that she should just be happy Louise was even in a serious relationship. Ultimately, her fears were realized when Louise became suspicious that her partner was being unfaithful to her after his habits became irregular and he seemed to become somewhat distant. While he was in the shower one morning, she checked his mobile phone logs and discovered calls upon calls to another female officer in the department Louise was acquainted with. After a long confrontation, he admitted the affair and said he was in love with the other woman, thereby ending his relationship with Louise. That evening, she barricaded herself in her flat, a heavy bureau blocking her door, and overdosed on lorazepam, the Millennium New Year’s Eve broadcast on BBC1 playing on the TV screen behind her. The last sound Louise heard was the wailing of the fire lorry coming to attempt to rescue her outside her tower block, and this marked the first downfall, the first demise she would experience because of her weakness due to a man in her life. It was 31 December 1999.
Louise woke up on the side of a motorway seemingly only scant seconds later, both dazed and confused as to where she was, absolutely no memory of what she'd done to herself the night before. Upon rising, she looked round herself, recognising virtually nothing, save for the cars whizzing by--they seemed smaller...outdated, even. But when Louise turned to the back, she could make out the London skyline...but half of it seemed to be missing. Her stomach roiling, she spotted an abandoned vehicle on the shoulder and walked up to it; upon catching her reflection in the passenger side window, she screamed in fright: her clothing, hair, and makeup were nearly 20 years out of date. Peering closer, Louise could make out the edges of a newspaper, The Independent; the headline read "ARGENTINA INVADES FALKLANDS". The date? 2 April, 1982. She fished into the inner pocket of her khaki-coloured mackintosh, and drew out her warrant card: her name was on it, and the rank she'd wanted so long was listed underneath it. "DETECTIVE CONSTABLE LOUISE GARDINER, WARRANT NO. 082774", it read, with her scrawled signature beneath, issued 1 January of the same year.
Utterly confused, heartbroken, and discombobulated, Louise wandered off to the division that had been listed as hers: Hanfield Branch, and in the weeks and months that followed, the young woman was unable to convince her DCI there had been some grave mistake, that she wasn't supposed to be there, that her branch was back on the other side of the city, that she never signed her name to that warrant card. She was laughed off, and especially by her fellow detectives when she mentioned she'd come from a point far into the future; 'H.G. Wells', they'd nicknamed her, and the only reason she never was sectioned for her behaviour was from her razor-sharp inclinations whilst on a case. Soon, she fell into duty, the time beginning to strip the old identity from her, dispersing it from her head and into the ether, and before long, Louise failed to remember her old life, never realising she was, along with everyone else, trapped within a kind of 'copper's limbo', meant for the souls of officers who'd met violent or untimely ends to sort themselves before becoming truly ready to move on.
Nevertheless, upon seeing her incisive skills in the field, her DCI, Terry Wilson, sent her on an undercover mission to retrieve intel about a former drug lord who he suspected was trying to rebuild his former cartel along with his son. Eager to impress her boss and secure a promotion to sergeant, Louise jumped in with both feet. But, DCI Wilson, unused to managing a female DC in this sort of work (it being the 80s, and still very much a man's work), left her to mostly fend for herself over a period of six months, no backup. Suddenly faced with a sense of disillusionment over her career, paired with an innate, fight-or-flight sense of self-preservation, eventually Louise stopped 'calling home', as it were, and found herself ingratiating her soul to the father-and-son team of heroin runners in an effort to stay alive.
As Stockholm Syndrome set in, Louise was no match for the evil that was the son. A sadistic criminal who exhibited antisocial and psychopathic behavior (mainly attributed to the amount of cocaine and other drugs consumed over the years as a result of his involvement with various cartels), he had a misogynistic view of women and enjoyed degrading and demoralizing them through both physical and emotional abuse. Louise’s feelings of duty overshadowed any common sense she may have had, especially as she was keen to impress her DCI in order to secure at least a hope of promotion in the near future. She allowed him to commit unspeakable acts of sexual aberration in the name of that duty, all of which would come back upon her again and again. Flashes of blood, the blade of a knife, torn clothing, being forced to perform in ways which caused her pain and demoralization.
On the other hand, Louise was also no match for the charms of the father. He treated her well, was protective, and showed her respect that most of her prior attachments hadn’t; certainly her own DCI didn’t show her compassion—he’d left her there to face horror without backup, alienated and alone. And to her detriment, Louise always possessed a sense of follow-through and responsibility, something she attributed to her upbringing, so she carried on, still somewhat confident she could pull through. In the end, her cover blown by another branch investigating crimes committed by the same gang, Louise was hit by a green van driven by the son in an attempt to flee the scene, and she died in a dank puddle as an overcast, grey sky drizzled rain upon her, her fellow officers having arrived on the scene and looking upon her, inner shame evident in their eyes.
In the last seconds, as blood trickled down her cheek and onto her blouse, the scenes from both lives played out in her dying brain side by side, as though coexisting, and just as she passed, Louise remembered, but it was too late. She was gone, her 'second chance' to make right having seemingly slipped away, the wailing of ambulance sirens ringing in her fading auditory pathways.
Louise would wake once more, one final time, the universe seeming to recognise the unfair terms by which she was released from the last go. This time, she landed in present-day London as a detective sergeant with Scotland Yard's homicide division, her prior knowledge and experience leading her to keep quiet about her past and finally attempt to right the wrongs she'd committed or endured in an effort to 'graduate' and move on to the heavenly realm, which is where I will be taking her into the game.
Canon Point: Louise will arrive in Sick Bay directly following being knocked out as she sprinted after a runaway shooter and his accomplice ambushing her from the side with the butt of his pistol.
Personality: Louise Gardiner was, and perhaps still is to some extent, a tragic person. Probably too sensitive and/or vulnerable to emotional manipulation, she should have picked a different career path. However, that very sensibility is what drew her to policing, that feeling of wanting to make a difference. She continues to have deep empathy for others and probably has felt that her life up to this point has had little meaning or real sense of purpose. Being in the business of helping save lives and put away for good the evil, she feels that in this way, she is redeeming all the poor qualities that she saw in herself. However, she still has a latent/default tendency to think too much concerning how others view her, and, worsening things, because of how she was treated by the Stafford father and son during her undercover mission, she suffered from extreme duality in how she then treated herself. Even though it wasn't her fault that the mission went south, she saw an inherent weakness in herself that she despised.
To expand on this more, in her canon, the father, was kind and loving to her as well as protective, and she was drawn to it as some hidden part of her felt she deserved to be treated well--harking back to another relationship in her past with a male that was positive: her father, before his death.
However, on the other hand, the sadistic son, Daniel, tapped into her negative feelings of self-worth, most likely encouraged by unchecked depression during that period, and this is evidenced in the destructive tendencies she displayed in becoming part of the cartel, becoming the sort of 'bent' copper she hated. Of course, the physical/mental abuse she suffered at the son's hands attacked her self-image; she felt that her body betrayed her in more ways than one. One, because she couldn't defend herself properly on her own (something she continued to blame herself for even when presented with the knowledge that any officer would need backup in these situations), and two, for even having been a WOMAN. She felt that her very physicality lent itself, at least partially, to being seen as prey--yet another "weakness" she perceived about herself.
The psychotic break/disillusionment she developed while undercover made her negative personality traits the worst they had ever been up to that point even as she maintained her sense of duty and accomplishment in seeing the undercover job through, and given the right circumstance, the PTSD and unhealthy behaviours she developed during her period undercover could resurface.
Moving forward in the friendship/relationship department, Louise had few friends and was/is known as somewhat of a loner, though she had been known for the odd night out with a few colleagues at the end of a particularly rough week on the job. However, Louise remains a very deep, emotional person although she can appear somewhat cool, aloof and steely at first glance. In the past, she'd eschewed most social gatherings and spent her free time curled up on the sofa or in a cafe, absorbed in either a book or in people watching with her headphones. The problem is simply that she will always be permanently altered by her failed undercover stint--it's part of who she is. However, it is worth noting that the right people or person could help lessen its intensity. and bring out the very best in her. In her past, she was reticent to give herself away, and remains this way to some extent, but compassion from another has allowed her to open up little by little, and the potential for her to develop a lasting friendship, and/or romantic relationship exists.
Supernatural Abilities: None; Louise is human.