Upcycle | Info
Tba!
On a special note, Morgan will receive a note within the first few days of her arrival that appears suddenly in her hand. It reads as thus:
We haven't, nor will we, mess with your mind.
But there are some things you have forgotten to protect yourself.
On a special note, Morgan will receive a note within the first few days of her arrival that appears suddenly in her hand. It reads as thus:
We haven't, nor will we, mess with your mind.
But there are some things you have forgotten to protect yourself.
Entry tags:
Entry tags:
Upcycle | Application
Name: Possum
Age: 29
Contact info:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
awkwardpossum
Character: Morgan Yu
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point: Mid-game, after her dad sends Walther Dahl up to Talos and he invades the station.
Character age: 30
Canon Abilities/Powers:
Morgan's supernatural abilities are all derived from these things called neuromods. In a gameplay context they're kind of like the plasmids in the Bioshock series (if you're familiar with those)? Except conceptually they're even worse than plasmids, because instead of just injecting yourself with science juice using a regular hypo, you have to press this inhaler looking thing over your eye and let it stab needles into your eye socket so it can rewrite your brain.
These abilities are all pretty "video gamey" in terms of their canon wiki descriptions and what they actually do in terms of game mechanics, so I tried to adapt them a little bit to be more roleplay friendly while still keeping within the limits of what the powers actually are, in terms of their origins and limitations.
Mimic Matter - Morgan "shapeshifts" into an inanimate object. (I put shapeshifting in quotation marks because it's really not as simple as changing the shape of her own body, but like, for all intents and purposes it's basically just shapeshifting.) She can only do simple objects and the amount of time she can hold the shape is limited by her natural psi pool.
Phantom Shift - Morgan teleports a short distance and leaves a spooky shadowy looking decoy in her place. The decoy is really meant to fool creatures that operate more on instinct than logic, such as animals, or spooky gooey space aliens.
Lift field- Morgan can manipulate gravity and lift objects up to 7 meters in the air, but she can only maintain the hold for about 30 seconds before she gets a splitting headache.
Superthermal (pyrokinesis) - Creates a blast of super heated plasma that erupts at whatever point in space Morgan chooses to focus her psi at. She can't do this more than once in a day without severely exhausting herself.
What is their greatest negative emotion towards an object, situation, or person in their past?:
Morgan's negative emotions are kind of complicated, and it's hard to pick what she's MOST negative about because she's really not a happy person. She's a depressed amnesiac mess. There's a lot of stuff that she hates, about her situation in the game, about Talos-1 and Transtar and the people she worked with and the things they did. Her family, her brother... But I'd say the thing she feels the worst about, deep down, is herself.
Ooooh, deep, right? But wait, it's actually not as straightforward as your standard self loathing! Morgan literally hates her past self, because in her current state doesn't remember being the person she used to be. She doesn't remember or identify as the Morgan Yu who was a billionaire super scientist, the woman who callously played with human lives in the name of progress. She doesn't remember being the woman who basically fed political prisoners to conscious-eating super-aliens just to develop high-end luxury brain modifications that her family's company could sell for massive profit. She literally sees herself as a different person now, but also can't divorce herself entirely from having been her at one point or another. She can't remember what any of her old motivations were, how she justified the lives she took in the name of science. She can only see the results of her previous actions, all the chaos and death that the escaped typhon have spread across the space station she wakes up on. She only has audio logs to go by otherwise, and secondhand interpretations based on what surviving NPCs tell her.
The old Morgan helped bring the typhon closer to humanity, and worked with her brother to ultimately put the entire planet in danger. The current Morgan despises her, and wants to undo everything she ever did.
How strongly do they feel about the negative subject matter, on the scale of one to ten?:
(cw: suicidal ideation I guess?)
Negatively enough to basically reject her past self and identify as a completely different person? And also negatively enough not give a shit if she gets blown up along with the space station because deep down she knows she can't really divorce herself from being that person, and she feels like it'd probably be better if she went down with the ship.
What is their greatest virtue?:
It's similarly hard to pin down Morgan's virtues because she's an extremely miserable person, but in terms of her actions within the game I'd say that her best virtue is her willingness to put others before herself. She's so desperate to make things right and make up for the past deeds of this woman she doesn't remember being, she'll willingly throw herself into great danger to try and protect the surviving members of the Talos crew. In a way, this is still kind of selfish; its' self-flagellation, viewing herself as being of less worth because she's terrible and nothing matters as long as she can stop the Typhon. This Morgan Yu has never heard of self-care and if she did, she would believe in it for literally everyone else in the world except for herself (and probably her immediate family.)
How aware are they of their virtue, on a scale from one to ten?:
I'd put her at about a 3? She's aware she puts herself in danger constantly to try and reach her goals but she doesn't view it as a virtue, she just views it as a necessity. A wrong that needs to be righted.
Items:
PPN-8 Personal Defense Sidearm (Silenced Pistol)
A bigass adjustable wrench
The GLOO Cannon
Samples:
https://illmetbymoo.dreamwidth.org/6335.html?thread=872127#cmt872127
https://pedalbike.dreamwidth.org/1918.html?thread=702334#cmt702334
Special notes
n/a
Age: 29
Contact info:
Character: Morgan Yu
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point: Mid-game, after her dad sends Walther Dahl up to Talos and he invades the station.
Character age: 30
Canon Abilities/Powers:
Morgan's supernatural abilities are all derived from these things called neuromods. In a gameplay context they're kind of like the plasmids in the Bioshock series (if you're familiar with those)? Except conceptually they're even worse than plasmids, because instead of just injecting yourself with science juice using a regular hypo, you have to press this inhaler looking thing over your eye and let it stab needles into your eye socket so it can rewrite your brain.
These abilities are all pretty "video gamey" in terms of their canon wiki descriptions and what they actually do in terms of game mechanics, so I tried to adapt them a little bit to be more roleplay friendly while still keeping within the limits of what the powers actually are, in terms of their origins and limitations.
What is their greatest negative emotion towards an object, situation, or person in their past?:
Morgan's negative emotions are kind of complicated, and it's hard to pick what she's MOST negative about because she's really not a happy person. She's a depressed amnesiac mess. There's a lot of stuff that she hates, about her situation in the game, about Talos-1 and Transtar and the people she worked with and the things they did. Her family, her brother... But I'd say the thing she feels the worst about, deep down, is herself.
Ooooh, deep, right? But wait, it's actually not as straightforward as your standard self loathing! Morgan literally hates her past self, because in her current state doesn't remember being the person she used to be. She doesn't remember or identify as the Morgan Yu who was a billionaire super scientist, the woman who callously played with human lives in the name of progress. She doesn't remember being the woman who basically fed political prisoners to conscious-eating super-aliens just to develop high-end luxury brain modifications that her family's company could sell for massive profit. She literally sees herself as a different person now, but also can't divorce herself entirely from having been her at one point or another. She can't remember what any of her old motivations were, how she justified the lives she took in the name of science. She can only see the results of her previous actions, all the chaos and death that the escaped typhon have spread across the space station she wakes up on. She only has audio logs to go by otherwise, and secondhand interpretations based on what surviving NPCs tell her.
The old Morgan helped bring the typhon closer to humanity, and worked with her brother to ultimately put the entire planet in danger. The current Morgan despises her, and wants to undo everything she ever did.
How strongly do they feel about the negative subject matter, on the scale of one to ten?:
(cw: suicidal ideation I guess?)
Negatively enough to basically reject her past self and identify as a completely different person? And also negatively enough not give a shit if she gets blown up along with the space station because deep down she knows she can't really divorce herself from being that person, and she feels like it'd probably be better if she went down with the ship.
What is their greatest virtue?:
It's similarly hard to pin down Morgan's virtues because she's an extremely miserable person, but in terms of her actions within the game I'd say that her best virtue is her willingness to put others before herself. She's so desperate to make things right and make up for the past deeds of this woman she doesn't remember being, she'll willingly throw herself into great danger to try and protect the surviving members of the Talos crew. In a way, this is still kind of selfish; its' self-flagellation, viewing herself as being of less worth because she's terrible and nothing matters as long as she can stop the Typhon. This Morgan Yu has never heard of self-care and if she did, she would believe in it for literally everyone else in the world except for herself (and probably her immediate family.)
How aware are they of their virtue, on a scale from one to ten?:
I'd put her at about a 3? She's aware she puts herself in danger constantly to try and reach her goals but she doesn't view it as a virtue, she just views it as a necessity. A wrong that needs to be righted.
Items:
Samples:
https://illmetbymoo.dreamwidth.org/6335.html?thread=872127#cmt872127
https://pedalbike.dreamwidth.org/1918.html?thread=702334#cmt702334
Special notes
n/a
Ill Met | Application
Player Information
Name: Possum
Contact:awkwardpossum
Over 18?: Yes
Character Information
Name: "Morgan Yu" (Typhon)
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point:
Age: 30 years old
History:
The Prey wiki is garbage so I had to write this all out myself, and I'm very sorry.
(Setting Background)
Prey takes place in an alternate timeline that diverged from our own history around the late 50’s/early 60’s. Broad strokes: JFK was never assassinated; the Russians encountered hostile alien lifeforms called typhon in the earliest days of the space race. The USA and the USSR wound up working together to contain and study the creatures, leading to new unprecedented advances in technology and space exploration.
Fast forward to Morgan’s time, and the big thing on everyone’s minds are Neuromods, a new technology developed by TranStar, a high-tech mega-corporation founded by Morgan’s parents. Neuromods are set to “revolutionize human learning”, basically by making it so that the knowledge and skills of super smart and talented people can be instantly transferred into the head of any average-joe who has the means to purchase the product. It’s big shit. You can gain a doctorate in chemical biology in like, 5 seconds. The only apparent downside—and the thing that the public doesn’t know-- is that if you uninstall a neuromod, your brain basically does a “restore from backup” like a computer dumping some problematic software, reverting your brain matter to an unmodified state; in other words, you take a neuromod out? You forget everything that happened between when you installed it and when you removed it. But surely that’s not a problem because hahaha, who would ever want to remove a Neuromod, right!??
Personal History:
-2005; Morgan is born, the second child of Catherine Yu, a German tech entrepreneur, and William Yu, a distinguished Chinese-American neuroscientist.
-2025; Morgan’s older brother Alex is appointed CEO of TranStar and Director of Research aboard Talos-I, a new super advanced fancy-ass space station owned by the company.
-2032; Morgan is recruited as co-director of research and development aboard Talos-I. She joins all the scientists in the station’s “psychotronics” department in playing god with the captive typhon organisms, studying their ecology. They also engage in dubious human experimentation on “volunteer” test subjects (read: political prisoners and convicts whose alternatives to becoming human lab rats are execution or life in a USSR prison), using them to collect data on typhon behavior and reproduction.
-2034; The Yu siblings realize they can use the brains of the typhon to make neuromods that basically give humans super powers. Morgan volunteers to be the guinea pig for this since she is arguably the best candidate, and insists that the only way to truly test these new mods in a controlled environment is to remove some of her earliest (non-typhon) mods and revert her mind back to the way it was before she ever even joined Talos-I. She willingly volunteers for this, knowing that in addition to losing years of her life, her mind will also be subject to a relentless cycle of amnesia, as testing the typhon-mods will require the repeated installation and removal of the experimental modifications with each session. She and her brother have a system in place to “bring her up to speed” between each trial.
Not long into the experiment, Morgan begins to experience “personality drift”, a reported side effect of the frequent cycling of neuromods. Morgan’s behavior becomes increasingly and notably erratic as a result, something that does not go unnoticed by the rest of the crew on Talos I. She alternates between being spacey, aggressive and paranoid on a day to day basis. She also starts having reoccurring dreams about something sinister lurking in deep space, and becomes convinced that “something big” is coming for them all that could spell doom not only for Talos-I, but the entire Earth. Alex insists this is all fine, that her concerns over the experiment are just a side effect of the mod cycling, and this is what she signed up for. Morgan starts to view Alex as an untrustworthy figure, and between her trials she begins using recordings and notes to herself to craft a series of complicated contingency plans. The goals of these plans vary, but they all share one common secondary purpose: to fill in the blanks in her memory, in case Alex decides to do something dubious.
February 2nd, 2035: Alex does something dubious. He makes the decision to keep experimenting on his younger sibling despite her worsening and exhausted condition, and stops bringing her up to speed between sessions. This essentially traps Morgan in a simulation loop that makes her live, forget, and then relive the same day of her life over and over for the course of several weeks. Study continues on the typhon neuromods in this time.
-February 22nd, 2035: As all dangerous science fiction monsters tend to eventually do, the typhon break containment. They spread across the station and slaughter nearly the entire crew, leaving only a handful of survivors.
-February 23rd, 2035: The point where the game finally actually starts. Morgan breaks out of the simulation loop with the assistance of January, a modified operator (robot) who speaks and thinks with Morgan’s voice and personality. January guides Morgan to her office, where and there Morgan watches a video from her past self, explaining the current situation to her amnesiac future self. This kicks off a complicated series of events that involve January guiding the amnesiac Morgan through the overrun station in search of two arming keys that she can use to rig the station’s reactor to overload and blow everything up, and thus spare Earth from a typhon invasion.
- ????? 2035: Morgan fails her mission and perishes. The Typhon invade Earth and proceed to lay waste to much of human civilization.
- ????? 2035-2036-ish: Alex Yu and a rag-tag team of Transtar scientists enact Project Cobolt, a last ditch effort to save humanity by creating a special human-typhon hybrid using Morgan Yu's connectome. They put their creation through a bunch of rigorous simulations to test it's capacity for empathy and cooperative teamwork.
Personality:
Pragmatic/Ruthless
Reserved
Despite her typically friendly outward demeanor, Morgan is difficult to truly get to know. She is reserved in how much she shares about herself, both out of necessity (due to the nature of her work) and out of habit from growing up under very strict and controlling parents. She’s good at keeping secrets, and also at distancing herself from others when she feels it necessary. She kept her relationship with Mikhaila Ilyushin under wraps and hid it from her brother, but was also quick to end the relationship when she was set to start testing the typhon neuromods, self-justified reasoning being that it would be easier for both of them if they ended things with Morgan’s impending memory wipe looming. Morgan never told Mikhaila about the experiments due to their top-secret nature, so she let the other woman believe that things were over between them due to an entirely different reason, and simply did not bother correcting her.
Quiet
Cautious
Guilty/Haunted
Where Morgan used to be excited about the idea of scientific progress by any means, her experiences in the sim lab and unexpected connection with the typhon have left her far more wary of the possible consequences of her work. Alex views this as her having turned into a “pessimist”, and further evidence of her drifting personality. January—who is basically the embodiment of past Morgan—views it as finally doing the right thing to keep Earth safe.
Morgan as she is now is a very conflicted person. She is filled with a lot of self-loathing and confusion upon the discovery of the things she apparently did in her past, including the human experimentation and dangerous testing on the typhon. She doesn’t view herself as a trustworthy or kind individual, although she will quickly put herself in harm’s way to defend others now. This may be in part because of her perception that other lives are worth more than her own, or self-sacrificing may be her way of atoning for past misdeeds.
Suspicious
Where and how did your character enter the Hedge?
After the Apex attacks Talos-1, Morgan had to make a mad rush out of the Arboretum to try and stop the beast.
Additional Memories Lost:
The big one: She does not remember her true identity as revealed in the post-credits of the game, that she is not ACTUALLY Morgan Yu, but rather a human-typhon hybrid created by Alex Yu and implanted with the real Morgan Yu's connectome.
Skillsets:
-Neurology
-Research/Development
-Detail oriented observational skills
-Robotics
-Amoral emotionally detatched human experimentation
Inventory:
Sample:
Name: Possum
Contact:
Over 18?: Yes
Character Information
Name: "Morgan Yu" (Typhon)
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point:
Age: 30 years old
History:
The Prey wiki is garbage so I had to write this all out myself, and I'm very sorry.
(Setting Background)
Prey takes place in an alternate timeline that diverged from our own history around the late 50’s/early 60’s. Broad strokes: JFK was never assassinated; the Russians encountered hostile alien lifeforms called typhon in the earliest days of the space race. The USA and the USSR wound up working together to contain and study the creatures, leading to new unprecedented advances in technology and space exploration.
Fast forward to Morgan’s time, and the big thing on everyone’s minds are Neuromods, a new technology developed by TranStar, a high-tech mega-corporation founded by Morgan’s parents. Neuromods are set to “revolutionize human learning”, basically by making it so that the knowledge and skills of super smart and talented people can be instantly transferred into the head of any average-joe who has the means to purchase the product. It’s big shit. You can gain a doctorate in chemical biology in like, 5 seconds. The only apparent downside—and the thing that the public doesn’t know-- is that if you uninstall a neuromod, your brain basically does a “restore from backup” like a computer dumping some problematic software, reverting your brain matter to an unmodified state; in other words, you take a neuromod out? You forget everything that happened between when you installed it and when you removed it. But surely that’s not a problem because hahaha, who would ever want to remove a Neuromod, right!??
Personal History:
-2005; Morgan is born, the second child of Catherine Yu, a German tech entrepreneur, and William Yu, a distinguished Chinese-American neuroscientist.
-2025; Morgan’s older brother Alex is appointed CEO of TranStar and Director of Research aboard Talos-I, a new super advanced fancy-ass space station owned by the company.
-2032; Morgan is recruited as co-director of research and development aboard Talos-I. She joins all the scientists in the station’s “psychotronics” department in playing god with the captive typhon organisms, studying their ecology. They also engage in dubious human experimentation on “volunteer” test subjects (read: political prisoners and convicts whose alternatives to becoming human lab rats are execution or life in a USSR prison), using them to collect data on typhon behavior and reproduction.
-2034; The Yu siblings realize they can use the brains of the typhon to make neuromods that basically give humans super powers. Morgan volunteers to be the guinea pig for this since she is arguably the best candidate, and insists that the only way to truly test these new mods in a controlled environment is to remove some of her earliest (non-typhon) mods and revert her mind back to the way it was before she ever even joined Talos-I. She willingly volunteers for this, knowing that in addition to losing years of her life, her mind will also be subject to a relentless cycle of amnesia, as testing the typhon-mods will require the repeated installation and removal of the experimental modifications with each session. She and her brother have a system in place to “bring her up to speed” between each trial.
Not long into the experiment, Morgan begins to experience “personality drift”, a reported side effect of the frequent cycling of neuromods. Morgan’s behavior becomes increasingly and notably erratic as a result, something that does not go unnoticed by the rest of the crew on Talos I. She alternates between being spacey, aggressive and paranoid on a day to day basis. She also starts having reoccurring dreams about something sinister lurking in deep space, and becomes convinced that “something big” is coming for them all that could spell doom not only for Talos-I, but the entire Earth. Alex insists this is all fine, that her concerns over the experiment are just a side effect of the mod cycling, and this is what she signed up for. Morgan starts to view Alex as an untrustworthy figure, and between her trials she begins using recordings and notes to herself to craft a series of complicated contingency plans. The goals of these plans vary, but they all share one common secondary purpose: to fill in the blanks in her memory, in case Alex decides to do something dubious.
February 2nd, 2035: Alex does something dubious. He makes the decision to keep experimenting on his younger sibling despite her worsening and exhausted condition, and stops bringing her up to speed between sessions. This essentially traps Morgan in a simulation loop that makes her live, forget, and then relive the same day of her life over and over for the course of several weeks. Study continues on the typhon neuromods in this time.
-February 22nd, 2035: As all dangerous science fiction monsters tend to eventually do, the typhon break containment. They spread across the station and slaughter nearly the entire crew, leaving only a handful of survivors.
-February 23rd, 2035: The point where the game finally actually starts. Morgan breaks out of the simulation loop with the assistance of January, a modified operator (robot) who speaks and thinks with Morgan’s voice and personality. January guides Morgan to her office, where and there Morgan watches a video from her past self, explaining the current situation to her amnesiac future self. This kicks off a complicated series of events that involve January guiding the amnesiac Morgan through the overrun station in search of two arming keys that she can use to rig the station’s reactor to overload and blow everything up, and thus spare Earth from a typhon invasion.
- ????? 2035: Morgan fails her mission and perishes. The Typhon invade Earth and proceed to lay waste to much of human civilization.
- ????? 2035-2036-ish: Alex Yu and a rag-tag team of Transtar scientists enact Project Cobolt, a last ditch effort to save humanity by creating a special human-typhon hybrid using Morgan Yu's connectome. They put their creation through a bunch of rigorous simulations to test it's capacity for empathy and cooperative teamwork.
Personality:
Pragmatic/Ruthless
Reserved
Despite her typically friendly outward demeanor, Morgan is difficult to truly get to know. She is reserved in how much she shares about herself, both out of necessity (due to the nature of her work) and out of habit from growing up under very strict and controlling parents. She’s good at keeping secrets, and also at distancing herself from others when she feels it necessary. She kept her relationship with Mikhaila Ilyushin under wraps and hid it from her brother, but was also quick to end the relationship when she was set to start testing the typhon neuromods, self-justified reasoning being that it would be easier for both of them if they ended things with Morgan’s impending memory wipe looming. Morgan never told Mikhaila about the experiments due to their top-secret nature, so she let the other woman believe that things were over between them due to an entirely different reason, and simply did not bother correcting her.
Quiet
Cautious
Guilty/Haunted
Where Morgan used to be excited about the idea of scientific progress by any means, her experiences in the sim lab and unexpected connection with the typhon have left her far more wary of the possible consequences of her work. Alex views this as her having turned into a “pessimist”, and further evidence of her drifting personality. January—who is basically the embodiment of past Morgan—views it as finally doing the right thing to keep Earth safe.
Morgan as she is now is a very conflicted person. She is filled with a lot of self-loathing and confusion upon the discovery of the things she apparently did in her past, including the human experimentation and dangerous testing on the typhon. She doesn’t view herself as a trustworthy or kind individual, although she will quickly put herself in harm’s way to defend others now. This may be in part because of her perception that other lives are worth more than her own, or self-sacrificing may be her way of atoning for past misdeeds.
Suspicious
Where and how did your character enter the Hedge?
After the Apex attacks Talos-1, Morgan had to make a mad rush out of the Arboretum to try and stop the beast.
Additional Memories Lost:
The big one: She does not remember her true identity as revealed in the post-credits of the game, that she is not ACTUALLY Morgan Yu, but rather a human-typhon hybrid created by Alex Yu and implanted with the real Morgan Yu's connectome.
Skillsets:
-Neurology
-Research/Development
-Detail oriented observational skills
-Robotics
-Amoral emotionally detatched human experimentation
Inventory:
Sample:
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Aefenglom | HMD
If you have questions, concerns or feedback on how I'm playing Morgan, this is the place to leave em'. Anon is off, but comments are screened.
Entry tags:
Aefenglom | IC Inbox
[Watch UN: january_protocol]
"This is Morgan. Go ahead."
Entry tags:
Aefenglom | Application
Player Information
Name: Possum
Age: 27
Contact:awkwardpossum
Other Characters: Peridot (Steven Universe)
Character Information
Name: Morgan Yu
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point: Late game, after watching Alex’s video and escaping Walther Dahl’s forces in the Arboretum.
Age: 30 years old
History:
(Setting Background)
Prey takes place in an alternate timeline that diverged from our own history around the late 50’s/early 60’s. Broad strokes: JFK was never assassinated; the Russians encountered hostile alien lifeforms called typhon in the earliest days of the space race. The USA and the USSR wound up working together to contain and study the creatures, leading to new unprecedented advances in technology and space exploration.
Fast forward to Morgan’s time, and the big thing on everyone’s minds are Neuromods, a new technology developed by TranStar, a high-tech mega-corporation founded by Morgan’s parents. Neuromods are set to “revolutionize human learning”, basically by making it so that the knowledge and skills of super smart and talented people can be instantly transferred into the head of any average-joe who has the means to purchase the product. It’s big shit. You can gain a doctorate in chemical biology in like, 5 seconds. The only apparent downside—and the thing that the public doesn’t know-- is that if you uninstall a neuromod, your brain basically does a “restore from backup” like a computer dumping some problematic software, reverting your brain matter to an unmodified state; in other words, you take a neuromod out? You forget everything that happened between when you installed it and when you removed it. But surely that’s not a problem because hahaha, who would ever want to remove a Neuromod, right!??
Personal History:
2005; Morgan is born, the second child of Catherine Yu, a German tech entrepreneur, and William Yu, a distinguished Chinese neuroscientist.
2025; Morgan’s older brother Alex is appointed CEO of TranStar and Director of Research aboard Talos-I, a new super advanced fancy-ass space station owned by the company.
2032; Morgan is recruited as co-director of research and development aboard Talos-I. She joins all the other scientists in the station’s “psychotronics” department in playing god with the captive typhon organisms, studying their ecology. They also engage in dubious human experimentation on “volunteer” test subjects (read: political prisoners and convicts whose alternatives to becoming human lab rats are execution or life in a USSR prison), using them to collect data on typhon behavior and reproduction.
2034; The Yu siblings realize they can use the brains of the typhon to make neuromods that basically give humans super powers. Morgan volunteers to be the guinea pig for this since she is arguably the best candidate, and insists that the only way to truly test these new mods in a controlled environment is to remove some of her earliest (non-typhon) mods and revert her mind back to the way it was before she ever even joined Talos-I. She willingly volunteers for this, knowing that in addition to losing years of her life, her mind will also be subject to a relentless cycle of amnesia, as testing the typhon-mods will require the repeated installation and removal of the experimental modifications with each session. She and her brother have a system in place to “bring her up to speed” between each trial.
Not long into the experiment, Morgan begins to experience “personality drift”, a reported side effect of the frequent cycling of neuromods. Morgan’s behavior becomes increasingly and notably erratic as a result, something that does not go unnoticed by the rest of the crew on Talos I. She alternates between being spacey, aggressive and paranoid on a day to day basis. She also starts having reoccurring dreams about something sinister lurking in deep space, and becomes convinced that “something big” is coming for them all that could spell doom not only for Talos-I, but the entire Earth. Alex insists this is all fine, that her concerns over the experiment are just a side effect of the mod cycling, and this is what she signed up for. Morgan starts to view Alex as an untrustworthy figure, and between her trials she begins using recordings and notes to herself to craft a series of complicated contingency plans. The goals of these plans vary, but they all share one common secondary purpose: to fill in the blanks in her memory, in case Alex decides to do something dubious.
February 2nd, 2035: Alex does something dubious. He makes the decision to keep experimenting on his younger sibling despite her worsening and exhausted condition, and stops bringing her up to speed between sessions. This essentially traps Morgan in a simulation loop that makes her live, forget, and then relive the same day of her life over and over for the course of several weeks. Study continues on the typhon neuromods in this time.
February 22nd, 2035: As all dangerous science fiction monsters tend to eventually do, the typhon break containment. They spread across the station and slaughter nearly the entire crew, leaving only a handful of survivors.
February 23rd, 2035: The point where the game finally actually starts. Morgan breaks out of the simulation loop with the assistance of January, a modified operator (robot) who speaks and thinks with Morgan’s voice and personality. January guides Morgan to her office, where she receives a video from her past self, explaining the current situation to her amnesiac future self. This kicks off a complicated series of events that involve the amnesiac Morgan, with January’s guidance, traversing the overrun station in search of two arming keys that she can use to rig the station’s reactor to overload and blow everything up, and thus spare Earth from a typhon invasion.
Personality:
Prior to the removal of her neuromods, Morgan was known as an extremely driven person who was very hyper-focused on her work. Well educated and intelligent, she was constantly innovating new ideas both in and out of the lab. Even during her downtime, she was known to tinker around with robotics and gadgetry, keeping a large work table stocked with various electronic parts in both her executive’s office and her personal quarters, so that she always had equipment close at hand whenever new ideas struck. She was extremely close to her brother Alex, and the two supported each other growing up under their parents’ heavy expectations. Morgan was definitely known to be (and arguably still is) the impulsive risk-taker of the two siblings, always pushing the envelope and questioning limitations, needling Alex and encouraging him to take things a few steps further. Alex would say that he “used to think we couldn’t be trusted to play with fire without burning the whole house down” until Morgan stubbornly convinced him that some scientific progress was worth the inherent risks. Indeed, Morgan was very much an “ends justify the means” kind of scientist for most of her life, and seemed to be perfectly fine with harming living beings in the pursuit of her studies. Given this, she is very good at compartmentalizing and distancing herself from the victims of her experimentations. She would maintain a calm and professional demeanor while on duty, even while participating in the cruel methods of experimentation that TranStar endorsed by providing “volunteer” human test subjects. There are records of Morgan authorizing test sessions that were essentially execution by typhon, “feeding” volunteers to the aliens in order to collect data on their means of reproduction. As cruel as this sounds, Morgan truly believed that what she was doing was justified, as it was ultimately for the benefit of all mankind, and the deaths of a few condemned prisoners were worth it. At one point, in defense of her beliefs, she insisted that the people of the next generation would be stronger, smarter, and immortal, and that they could judge her if they wanted to, but they would know that they only exist as they do because of her efforts.
Outside of the lab, Morgan had a much more approachable and “chillaxed” demeanor, known for pulling the occasional prank and and breaking protocol by getting somewhat chummy with the rest of the Talos-I crew (much to the chagrin of her more uptight CEO brother). She has a very dry sense of humor, and even post mod removal this remains intact, with the research notes she takes down over the course of the game having a bit of a sardonic, sometimes self-deprecating touch. She has a kind of tired 30-something depressed tumblr shitposter vibe, doing things like describing her own elemental resistances in her research notes (the way she would for a scanned enemy) as being resistant to “good advice” and weak to “toxic family”. January, being a direct scan of Morgan’s personality, demonstrates this attitude as well through occasional sassy deadpan jokes.
Despite being the more approachable of the Yus, it is still difficult to truly get close to Morgan. January cites that Morgan is a naturally suspicious person, and despite her outwardly friendly demeanor she is difficult to truly get to know. She is somewhat reserved in how much she shares about herself, both out of necessity (due to the nature of her work) and out of habit from growing up under very strict and controlling parents. She’s good at keeping secrets, and also at distancing herself from others when she feels it necessary. She kept her relationship with Mikhaila Ilyushin under wraps and hid it from her brother, but was also quick to end the relationship when she was set to start testing the typhon neuromods, the reasoning being that it would be easier for both of them if they ended things with Morgan’s impending memory wipe looming. Morgan never told Mikhaila about the experiments due to their top-secret nature, so she let the other woman believe that things were over between them due to an entirely different reason, and simply did not bother correcting her.
By the time we step into Morgan’s shoes at the starting point of the game, her perspective on everything has shifted dramatically. She barely remembers who she is or what she’s done, save for what she knows from January’s briefings and from impressions she gets from the recordings and emails that she has collected from around Talos-I. The basic building blocks of her original personality are all still there, however, even in spite of the supposed personality drift. If anything, the “personality” traits that Alex claims have changed about her are more an adjustment of priorities and motivations. Where Morgan used to be excited about the idea of scientific progress by any means, her experiences in the sim lab and unexpected connection with the typhon have left her far more wary of the possible consequences of her work. Alex views this as her having turned into a “pessimist”, and further evidence of her drifting personality. January—who is basically the embodiment of past Morgan—views it as finally doing the right thing to keep Earth safe.
Morgan as she is now is a very conflicted person. She is filled with a lot of self-loathing and confusion upon the discovery of the things she apparently did in her past, including the human experimentation and dangerous testing on the typhon. She doesn’t view herself as a trustworthy or kind individual, although she will quickly put herself in harm’s way to defend others now. This may be in part because of her perception that other lives are worth more than her own, or self-sacrificing may be her way of atoning for past misdeeds.
Abilities & Skills:
-Building and programming robots
-Inventing things
-Engineering
-Modifying weapons
-Stealthing; being trapped on a space station full of hostile murderous aliens meant Morgan had to git gud at sneaking pretty quick.
Inventory/Companions:V
-TranStar PPN-8 9MM Silenced Pistol (30 bullets)
-A wrench
-GLOO Cannon (limited ammo)
-2 bags of Big Bang Candy (1 open, 1 sealed)
-1 spare parts kit
Choice: Witch
Reason: I figure having one character who’s a monster and one character who is a witch should make for a pretty good balance, plus Morgan would be very interested in studying magic and seeing if there was any way she could use it to change things for the better back home.
Sample:
TDM thread
Name: Possum
Age: 27
Contact:
Other Characters: Peridot (Steven Universe)
Character Information
Name: Morgan Yu
Canon: Prey (2017)
Canon Point: Late game, after watching Alex’s video and escaping Walther Dahl’s forces in the Arboretum.
Age: 30 years old
History:
(Setting Background)
Prey takes place in an alternate timeline that diverged from our own history around the late 50’s/early 60’s. Broad strokes: JFK was never assassinated; the Russians encountered hostile alien lifeforms called typhon in the earliest days of the space race. The USA and the USSR wound up working together to contain and study the creatures, leading to new unprecedented advances in technology and space exploration.
Fast forward to Morgan’s time, and the big thing on everyone’s minds are Neuromods, a new technology developed by TranStar, a high-tech mega-corporation founded by Morgan’s parents. Neuromods are set to “revolutionize human learning”, basically by making it so that the knowledge and skills of super smart and talented people can be instantly transferred into the head of any average-joe who has the means to purchase the product. It’s big shit. You can gain a doctorate in chemical biology in like, 5 seconds. The only apparent downside—and the thing that the public doesn’t know-- is that if you uninstall a neuromod, your brain basically does a “restore from backup” like a computer dumping some problematic software, reverting your brain matter to an unmodified state; in other words, you take a neuromod out? You forget everything that happened between when you installed it and when you removed it. But surely that’s not a problem because hahaha, who would ever want to remove a Neuromod, right!??
Personal History:
2005; Morgan is born, the second child of Catherine Yu, a German tech entrepreneur, and William Yu, a distinguished Chinese neuroscientist.
2025; Morgan’s older brother Alex is appointed CEO of TranStar and Director of Research aboard Talos-I, a new super advanced fancy-ass space station owned by the company.
2032; Morgan is recruited as co-director of research and development aboard Talos-I. She joins all the other scientists in the station’s “psychotronics” department in playing god with the captive typhon organisms, studying their ecology. They also engage in dubious human experimentation on “volunteer” test subjects (read: political prisoners and convicts whose alternatives to becoming human lab rats are execution or life in a USSR prison), using them to collect data on typhon behavior and reproduction.
2034; The Yu siblings realize they can use the brains of the typhon to make neuromods that basically give humans super powers. Morgan volunteers to be the guinea pig for this since she is arguably the best candidate, and insists that the only way to truly test these new mods in a controlled environment is to remove some of her earliest (non-typhon) mods and revert her mind back to the way it was before she ever even joined Talos-I. She willingly volunteers for this, knowing that in addition to losing years of her life, her mind will also be subject to a relentless cycle of amnesia, as testing the typhon-mods will require the repeated installation and removal of the experimental modifications with each session. She and her brother have a system in place to “bring her up to speed” between each trial.
Not long into the experiment, Morgan begins to experience “personality drift”, a reported side effect of the frequent cycling of neuromods. Morgan’s behavior becomes increasingly and notably erratic as a result, something that does not go unnoticed by the rest of the crew on Talos I. She alternates between being spacey, aggressive and paranoid on a day to day basis. She also starts having reoccurring dreams about something sinister lurking in deep space, and becomes convinced that “something big” is coming for them all that could spell doom not only for Talos-I, but the entire Earth. Alex insists this is all fine, that her concerns over the experiment are just a side effect of the mod cycling, and this is what she signed up for. Morgan starts to view Alex as an untrustworthy figure, and between her trials she begins using recordings and notes to herself to craft a series of complicated contingency plans. The goals of these plans vary, but they all share one common secondary purpose: to fill in the blanks in her memory, in case Alex decides to do something dubious.
February 2nd, 2035: Alex does something dubious. He makes the decision to keep experimenting on his younger sibling despite her worsening and exhausted condition, and stops bringing her up to speed between sessions. This essentially traps Morgan in a simulation loop that makes her live, forget, and then relive the same day of her life over and over for the course of several weeks. Study continues on the typhon neuromods in this time.
February 22nd, 2035: As all dangerous science fiction monsters tend to eventually do, the typhon break containment. They spread across the station and slaughter nearly the entire crew, leaving only a handful of survivors.
February 23rd, 2035: The point where the game finally actually starts. Morgan breaks out of the simulation loop with the assistance of January, a modified operator (robot) who speaks and thinks with Morgan’s voice and personality. January guides Morgan to her office, where she receives a video from her past self, explaining the current situation to her amnesiac future self. This kicks off a complicated series of events that involve the amnesiac Morgan, with January’s guidance, traversing the overrun station in search of two arming keys that she can use to rig the station’s reactor to overload and blow everything up, and thus spare Earth from a typhon invasion.
Personality:
Prior to the removal of her neuromods, Morgan was known as an extremely driven person who was very hyper-focused on her work. Well educated and intelligent, she was constantly innovating new ideas both in and out of the lab. Even during her downtime, she was known to tinker around with robotics and gadgetry, keeping a large work table stocked with various electronic parts in both her executive’s office and her personal quarters, so that she always had equipment close at hand whenever new ideas struck. She was extremely close to her brother Alex, and the two supported each other growing up under their parents’ heavy expectations. Morgan was definitely known to be (and arguably still is) the impulsive risk-taker of the two siblings, always pushing the envelope and questioning limitations, needling Alex and encouraging him to take things a few steps further. Alex would say that he “used to think we couldn’t be trusted to play with fire without burning the whole house down” until Morgan stubbornly convinced him that some scientific progress was worth the inherent risks. Indeed, Morgan was very much an “ends justify the means” kind of scientist for most of her life, and seemed to be perfectly fine with harming living beings in the pursuit of her studies. Given this, she is very good at compartmentalizing and distancing herself from the victims of her experimentations. She would maintain a calm and professional demeanor while on duty, even while participating in the cruel methods of experimentation that TranStar endorsed by providing “volunteer” human test subjects. There are records of Morgan authorizing test sessions that were essentially execution by typhon, “feeding” volunteers to the aliens in order to collect data on their means of reproduction. As cruel as this sounds, Morgan truly believed that what she was doing was justified, as it was ultimately for the benefit of all mankind, and the deaths of a few condemned prisoners were worth it. At one point, in defense of her beliefs, she insisted that the people of the next generation would be stronger, smarter, and immortal, and that they could judge her if they wanted to, but they would know that they only exist as they do because of her efforts.
Outside of the lab, Morgan had a much more approachable and “chillaxed” demeanor, known for pulling the occasional prank and and breaking protocol by getting somewhat chummy with the rest of the Talos-I crew (much to the chagrin of her more uptight CEO brother). She has a very dry sense of humor, and even post mod removal this remains intact, with the research notes she takes down over the course of the game having a bit of a sardonic, sometimes self-deprecating touch. She has a kind of tired 30-something depressed tumblr shitposter vibe, doing things like describing her own elemental resistances in her research notes (the way she would for a scanned enemy) as being resistant to “good advice” and weak to “toxic family”. January, being a direct scan of Morgan’s personality, demonstrates this attitude as well through occasional sassy deadpan jokes.
Despite being the more approachable of the Yus, it is still difficult to truly get close to Morgan. January cites that Morgan is a naturally suspicious person, and despite her outwardly friendly demeanor she is difficult to truly get to know. She is somewhat reserved in how much she shares about herself, both out of necessity (due to the nature of her work) and out of habit from growing up under very strict and controlling parents. She’s good at keeping secrets, and also at distancing herself from others when she feels it necessary. She kept her relationship with Mikhaila Ilyushin under wraps and hid it from her brother, but was also quick to end the relationship when she was set to start testing the typhon neuromods, the reasoning being that it would be easier for both of them if they ended things with Morgan’s impending memory wipe looming. Morgan never told Mikhaila about the experiments due to their top-secret nature, so she let the other woman believe that things were over between them due to an entirely different reason, and simply did not bother correcting her.
By the time we step into Morgan’s shoes at the starting point of the game, her perspective on everything has shifted dramatically. She barely remembers who she is or what she’s done, save for what she knows from January’s briefings and from impressions she gets from the recordings and emails that she has collected from around Talos-I. The basic building blocks of her original personality are all still there, however, even in spite of the supposed personality drift. If anything, the “personality” traits that Alex claims have changed about her are more an adjustment of priorities and motivations. Where Morgan used to be excited about the idea of scientific progress by any means, her experiences in the sim lab and unexpected connection with the typhon have left her far more wary of the possible consequences of her work. Alex views this as her having turned into a “pessimist”, and further evidence of her drifting personality. January—who is basically the embodiment of past Morgan—views it as finally doing the right thing to keep Earth safe.
Morgan as she is now is a very conflicted person. She is filled with a lot of self-loathing and confusion upon the discovery of the things she apparently did in her past, including the human experimentation and dangerous testing on the typhon. She doesn’t view herself as a trustworthy or kind individual, although she will quickly put herself in harm’s way to defend others now. This may be in part because of her perception that other lives are worth more than her own, or self-sacrificing may be her way of atoning for past misdeeds.
Abilities & Skills:
-Building and programming robots
-Inventing things
-Engineering
-Modifying weapons
-Stealthing; being trapped on a space station full of hostile murderous aliens meant Morgan had to git gud at sneaking pretty quick.
Inventory/Companions:V
-TranStar PPN-8 9MM Silenced Pistol (30 bullets)
-A wrench
-GLOO Cannon (limited ammo)
-2 bags of Big Bang Candy (1 open, 1 sealed)
-1 spare parts kit
Choice: Witch
Reason: I figure having one character who’s a monster and one character who is a witch should make for a pretty good balance, plus Morgan would be very interested in studying magic and seeing if there was any way she could use it to change things for the better back home.
Sample:
TDM thread