Zee Captain

At first pass, Captain is an egocentric, eccentric commander, given over to pursuing flights of fancy and making games out of everything from basic survival on up through extremely complicated reenactments from their vivid imagination. There is very little that Captain takes seriously that is conventional, though they go to great lengths to secure and understand what others might deem trivial. When they speak, it is often with a casual confidence that dips regularly towards insanity (or simply inanity) bubbly enthusiasm, or dictatorial command.

The reason for this stems from Captain's upbringing and their extremely close brushes with the programs that have made such a mess of the matrix from which they originate. According to Captain, they were born a little girl in Germany, with altered DNA meant to make her outlive other humans... but other anecdotes suggest that they were also raised as a boy, and that experiments had been done upon them before even being brought into the Good Directorate study facilities as the infamous Subject Seven. Regardless, Captain has shown that they are extremely observant, and pick up upon specific themes (royalty, rank and dictatorial regimes; old-fashioned gentleman behaviour; and teenaged pop culture from the late 20th century being key among them) but they also tend to echo that which they have experienced directly.

For example, Captain is happy to submit the other survivors under their command to cruel experiments, thoughtless bureaucracy and pointless, corporate buzzword hype in a very similar fashion to that which is displayed by other G-Dir forces still active in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, suggesting that Captain has at some point themselves been a target of such behaviour. Certainly, when they were discovered and brought in for testing under the label 'Subject Seven' they were questioned constantly and studied endlessly by G-Dir scientists. Captain, often displaying symptoms of temporal asynchronicity and extremely good luck, confounded their testers not only because of their strange physical properties, but because of their opaque behaviour and general obstreperous unwillingness to cooperate.

That trait translated well from their pre-war life to the apocalypse: Captain will eke out cracks in the chain of command whenever possible in order to get their own opinion in edge-wise, and they do not take no for an answer. Whenever posed with circumstances meant to intimidate, they act unpredictably, usually outlandishly. Captain has a grudging streak as deep as the Mariana Trench. One example of this can be found in their war against traffic lights (yes, this is a canonical, if minor point) -- it seems nonsensical at first, but when it becomes apparent that each traffic light is an artificial intelligence of its own, ruthlessly anal retentive and capable of imposing strict laws by alerting authorities to any minor infraction, Captain's justifications are somewhat more clear.

At some point during the break-down between the hurried experiments and the gyring bureaucracy of the corporation responsible for it, Subject Seven was promoted up the chain of command to the rank of Captain shortly before the apocalypse began, and because of this it is quite likely that Captain played a starring role in the end of the world. Given access to the AI responsible for storing much of humanity's minds, ANNET, Captain hurled a mug of boiling tea upon her server banks, causing her to go on a head-exploding rampage. When the system administrator, Doctor Gromov, discovered that Captain was the only person left to fight back against this AI revolt, he gave the order for nuclear bombs to be dropped on the rest of ANNET's servers. The Captain obliged, and the rest of the world, suspecting terrorist activity, over-responded and sent bombs all across the last inhabitable places on the planet.

Captain's ineffable confidence suggests that they have absolutely no qualms with this villainy. Whenever asked about their reasons for any action, they tend to shout down skepticism with cuttingly turned-about criticism, brute optimism and opaque anecdotes. It is likely that Captain's reasons for starting the war fell back on a mixture of vengeance, temporal justification, and self-importance, but they refuse to answer questions. It's been years for them from that point to the present in any case. In the interim they had been blissfully ordering their minions about the playing field that was the ruins of the planet, setting up some elaborate chess game with the remaining players -- read, programs of the matrix -- to either amuse themselves or to further their enigmatic aims. Chances are good that whatever Captain's thought processes are, they are augmented by their lack of proper grounding, so any infamy or villainy is a mixture of coincidence (in which the end is always justified by the means because the end is happening/was happening/has already happened/will happen) and glee justified by childish representations of ill-doers, or even good-doers with tragic twists of character.

With great mustache comes great responsibility, after all.

Captain has been out of their matrix for roughly one and a half months. They have had time to acclimatize physically to their new surroundings, but their mind, deprived of its augmented input, is having a difficult time adjusting. Because of their generally infuriating stubbornness, it became clear that though Captain was hoped to be an extremely powerful freedom fighter for the cause of the humans, that is not likely to happen any time soon... at least not conventionally. Captain has so far been happy to shuffle around Zion and chat up the religious clerks to whom they have been pawned off on, though they are not the kind to be kept mollified by picking flowers for very long. Captain has no specific qualms about being out of the matrix, though they still strongly believe themselves to be the ruler of a fictitious nation called 'Captania', and so far almost every interaction they have had has been in light of attempting to convince or coerce Zionites to join its mighty forces for beauty and truth. Most think that Captain is so far off the deep end they are out of sight of land, but it may just be that Captain is taking an extended amount of time to readjust to their new living conditions. Whether others should be afraid or not when that occurs is still up in the air.

Captain's page on the RA wiki provides a decent introduction to the character.

A good deal of supposition about a Romantically Apocalytpic Matrix AU can be found under Charles Snippy's Systemwide Application, however it is worth noting that Captain's perception of this matrix may have been different from Snippy's. Captain is canonically a temporal anomaly, meaning that their perception of the future-past does not run in a linear fashion when plugged into their matrix. A striking example can be found by comparing this panel and this panel, in which a single conversation is happening between Captain and a reanimated skeleton over a span of time.

Many Matrix-AU comparisons can also be found here (written in collaboration with Dilly, Snippy's player). Captain seems capable of rewriting the code of their simulation on a subconscious level, usually in small ways but to huge results. A simple example might be in pulling an umbrella from their trench-coat when falling from a great height and having that umbrella be able to float them safely to the ground. More complicated examples involve coming into possession of a straw capable of sucking up a black hole meant to rip the planet apart. Whatever the case, it seems that Captain has System Wizard status within ANNET's control of the digital aspects of the planet, which means that they have some kind of in on the architecture of the simulation. That is not likely to hold true once they enter other simulations, save perhaps at a local level -- that is, on or immediately around their person. Captain's antics are also fractious enough that they tend to draw attention: they have accidentally summoned an alien ship out of warp space, for example, which through the destruction of said ship drew attention of the 'Intergalactic Space Invaders Union' -- which is to say most likely that Captain has drawn attention from machines or programs even from without their own matrix. Before ever becoming aware that there is life beyond the desolate wastelands of the simulation they have also spurred their minions to such actions that drew down the attention of law-enforcing Agents.

One important note to make about Captain's Matrix as compared to simulations more close to the sixth iteration is that the programs that populate this desolate wasteland are much more overt, aware, and available for interaction. Infrastructure, architecture, and items right down to park benches, mobile traffic lights, food freshness monitors, hotel elevator buttons, and vending machines have AI minds that can interact with Users -- those able to pick up the mental broadband wavelengths at which ANNET broadcasts. Anyone with a connectable mind (read 99% of those who enter or still survive within the simulation), is capable of hearing and interacting with these programs. Each is usually fairly simple, but they pose a danger to freedom fighters entering this matrix in that they will log interactions with Users and, if they find anything anomalous about them (for example, that they do not have an existing account with the badly functioning remainders of ANNET's system), this activity may be promoted on up to law enforcement agents. The only thing that allows the Romantically Apocalyptic simulation to be accessible by infiltrators at this point is the fact that the degradation of the simulation leaves very few DEX programs (Agents similar to canon) functional to intercept them, and most (but not all) AI-controlled inanimate objects have little self-defence to bring to bear against perceived infractions. Even despite the overbearing control of ANNET in her prime, there are dangers within the dead lands of this simulation beyond harmful levels of radiation and inhospitable weather.

Perhaps hand in hand with this, manipulation of code by Operators -- and occasionally others savvy to the simulation's structure -- are more easily able to tap the underlying works of this simulation without immediate and damaging effects... at least, not in the same way as regular matrix simulations. At one point in a future-flung story-arc of Romantically Apocalyptic, it is shown that the medieval era recovered populations of the earth have become so integrated with the digital (and vice versa) that nobles are known as 'Local Hosts', and wizard-like 'magic' users are known as 'Mods' or even fabled 'Admins'. They use verbal incantations that seem to register in the physical world, for example, summoning wreckage like burning busses to drop on enemies. It's suggested that these things are summoned from the past, or perhaps just other points in time, meaning that the entire planet (or at least simulation) is canonically vetted towards an integrated temporal anomaly. Because it is suggested that the Biomatrix and offshoots of its viral strings are accountable for the restoration of the planet from a wintry apocalypse to a thriving, exotic new world, it is likely that even in the present, freedom fighters could utilize this viral program at their own risk to slip new and innovative quirks into the simulation. Much like Smith infiltrated Bane, the fungal spores of the Biomatrix that have not anchored themselves to the Janus Protocol-copied Snippy would likely be a very real threat to those who tamper with it while plugged in. Extreme caution is advised for those wishing to investigate this anomalous, experimental simulation.