CDC app

[proselytized]

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: Abby
✖ Contact: AIM: ooblackcoffeeoo | prosodi
✖ Are You Over 16: Y
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: Cdr. Shepard (2leftfeet)

CHARACTER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Cohle, Rustin
✖ Canon: True Detective; the end of 1995 just prior to the time skip to 2002.
✖ Character Appearance:

✖ Character Age: Mid-30's
✖ Pick A Number: 995, 005

✖ Canon Setting: Earth - specifically Louisiana, specifically 1995. Despite allusions to Rust's globe trotting, his world is defined by raw wilderness be they literal - his childhood spent in Alaska - or metaphorical - the moral wasteland of undercover work, the intellectual tar pit of working backwoods criminal cases. His version of the universe is colored by violence and regurgitated nihilism (because, spoiler alert, Rustin Cohle is an asshole). While firmly set in reality, Rustin Cohle has made a profession (a way of life) of putting himself squarely in the messiest parts of humanity; as a result, our view of the world through him is rife with social and political corruption, the violence of men, and the victimization of innocents.

✖ Character History: >>WIKI<<

While a fairly accurate representation of pre-canon Rustin Cohle, the above wiki does have a few clarity issues that I'd like to resolve. For the sake of brevity, a list!:

• After his daughter's death, Rust throws himself into his work which he how he ends up on a joint task force in a high drug trafficking zone, going deep undercover. His PTSD is likely the result of the combination of the two.
• He avoided facing charges for shooting the unarmed meth addict by maintaining his undercover alias. During this time, he associated himself with a biker gang slash drug traffickers known as 'The Iron Crusaders'.
• After being shot in the Port of Houston, he was presumed dead by his underworld contacts and subsequently withdrawn from his undercover position.

Transferring to Louisiana, Rustin Cohle is partnered with Detective Martin Hart. The two work together for a few months, breezing through a few 'open and shut' cases until they're eventually summoned to a murder scene in the cane fields outside Erath. The crime scene in question is blatantly ritualistic: the Jane Doe (later identified as Dora Kelly Lange) has been stripped naked and posed as if praying beneath a tree, adorned with a crown of deer antlers; she has a black spiral painted on her back. The crime scene is dotted with 'Devil's Traps', rudimentary twig sculptures. Though his partner is skeptical, Rust is convinced the woman (likely a prostitute) isn't the killer's first victim. This launches them into an investigation that will ultimately span decades.

While canvassing the nearby neighbors in an attempt to ID their Jane, a local brings up the name Marie Fontenot - a girl who disappeared five years ago. Chasing the lead, they also find a report of a girl being chased through the woods by a "green-eared spaghetti monster". If you're thinking there's no connection between a dead prostitute and missing children, you're right! But Nick Pizzolatto doesn't care about writing mysteries and really just wants to explore Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart's personal downward spirals. Luckily this is facilitated by Martin's wife inviting Rust to dinner (seemingly one of many invites); Marty insists he can't refuse this one and Rust grudgingly accepts - it's his daughter's birthday and he's already off-footed. Before dinner, Rust hits up a truck stop bar and asking some prostitutes a) about their vic, and b) where he can his hands on some barbiturates. --He also gets hammered and is still drunk when he shows up at Marty's with a bouquet of flowers (a desperate apologetic gesture). Hart's wife, Maggie, takes pity on him and tries to engage him in conversation. While Marty is out of the room, Rust reveals to Maggie he used to be a father before his daughter died. She is, of course, mortified.

Because missing children seem to be their only lead, they eventually follow up on Marie Fontenot's disappearance by interviewing her close relatives(/primary caretakers seeing as her mother is apparently a dead beat who fucked off soon after Marie's disappearance). In a broken down playhouse in the backyard, Rust discovers another twig sculpture similar to those at the Dora Lange crime scene.

With an ID coming back on their vic, they interview Dora's close friends (and ex-husband currently serving time in county) and discover that she was attending a church before she dropped off the grid. Meanwhile, Marty is cheating on his wife - something that Rust has no hesitation about commenting on which, unsurprisingly, doesn't exactly improve their already rocky partnership. Furthering those tensions, they soon discover that a special task force is being formed to investigate crimes of an 'Anti-Christian' nature and will assist in the investigation. Rust is unimpressed and Marty all but tells him to keep his mouth shut because it's the idea of Reverend Lee Tuttle, brother to the governor and a man of significance in his own right.

Unable to get a lock on this mystery church, Rust eventually finds himself returning to one of the prostitutes from the truck stop. He's technically there to buy some drugs off her, though in the process he manages to ask a few questions and some of them turn out to be the right ones - she directs him to a "Bunny Ranch" known to harbor runaways. The next day, Rust and Martin chase down the location of the ranch (Rust beats it out of a mechanic with the business end of a toolbox). When they arrive at the ranch, the woman running it and one of Dora's close friends, Beth, confirm she was living there. Beth gives Rust and Marty Dora's personal belongings that were left behind; her bag contains a diary filled with writings about a 'Yellow King' and, happily, a flyer for a church. When they arrive at the address, they find the church has been mostly destroyed by a fire. Luckily, psuedo-satanists love symbolism and Rust discovers a painting of a woman with deer antlers on one of the remaining walls of the church - they're on the right track, wherever it might lead.

Tracking down the church's remaining congregation (now operating out of a tent), Rust and Marty question the preacher - Joel Theriot - about Dora. He confirms she was a member of the church and other church goers say that Dora was often seen in the company of a tall man with scars on his face. Beyond that, the likely suspects in the church have a solid alibi. Seemingly having arrived at a dead end, Rust turns to searching through files in search of cases similar to Dora. Eventually he stumbles across Rianne Olivier, a supposedly accidental death - only she has the same spiral mark on her shoulder. When they question Olivier's grandfather, he tells them she attended Way of Light - a religious school owned and operated by Reverend Tuttle. She apparently eventually ran off with her boyfriend, Reggie Ledoux. A check turns back that Ledoux is a known drug dealer, sex offender and evidently a former cellmate of Dora Lange's husband. Giddy from the first whiff of success, Rust and Marty put out an APB on Ledoux and zoom off into the sunset to track down their man.

They return to county where they interrogate Lange's ex. He describes Ledoux as a 'psycho' and tells Rust and Marty that at one point he showed the man photos of Dora in an attempt to stay on his good side. Unsure of Ledoux's current whereabouts, he does the next best thing: fingers a known associate by the name of Tyrone Weems. He also reveals that Ledoux once told him about a group of rich white dudes who liked to get together in the woods and get up to some "devil worship" that involved sacrificing women and children. Thanks for the tip, buddy.

Marty tracks down Weems at a warehouse rave (in case you forgot this was the mid-90's) and Weems squeals, saying Ledoux is cooking meth exclusively for the Iron Crusaders now. DUN! Meanwhile, Hart's home life has self destructed - having found out about his affair, and he returns home to find her and the children missing and his packed bags at the door. He goes to the hospital to confront Maggie while she's working; before security can drag him off, Maggie calls Rust over and he convinces Marty to give her space and that he needs help The Case. Marty consequently crashes at Rust's sad, empty house and Rust tells him some horrifying stories from his time working the border that may or may not be total bullshit but at least solidifies Rust as a Total (Tryhard) Badass for anyone who might still be wondering. They concoct a plan over slugs of Jameson: Rust, having history with the Iron Crusaders from his days as an undercover operative, takes sick leave to "visit his dad who is dying of cancer, no really" to infiltrate the gang off the books. If this seems like literally the hardest, most self-destructive way to follow a lead that's because it is. To buy his way back into the Crusader's good graces, he jacks a pound of high-grade cocaine from the evidence locker at work (replacing it with a pound of flour).

The two of them travel out of their jurisdiction to hit up a Crusader's hang out. Donning his old persona (complete with greasy hair and shitty leather jacket), Rust tells Marty to wait in the car as he makes his way into the bar. He meets up with an old contact, Ginger, who grills him on his whereabouts. Rust says he bounced to Mexico when he got shot and, after recovering, eventually joined up with the Mexican cartel - but now he's looking to break from the cartel and fly solo, so to speak. He wants to trade cocaine for a backdoor contract with the Crusader's meth dealer, but Ginger needs reassurance: if Rust helps them rob a stash house in the projects that night, he'll give him a line to Ledoux. Rust leaves Marty, takes off from the bar in a boat with Ginger and his cohorts to a halfway house. There Ginger and his gang disguise themselves as law enforcement and eventually they all get into a SUV and travel to their hit.

When they hit the stash house, the plan (as Rust predicts) pretty much immediately goes to shit. A resident is shot which causes the residents to turn on the barricaded house. With the authorities on their way to investigate the disturbance, Rust drags Ginger out of the shit storm through the back door. They manage to navigate their way through the projects, Ginger mostly at gunpoint, to contact Marty en route, and eventually escape over a fence where Marty picks them up just as the police arrive on the scene. They get out, but only by the skin of Rust's teeth.

Thanks to the careful (read: may or may not have also involved the business end of yet another toolbox) coercion of Ginger, Rust - still undercover - meets with DeWall Ledoux in a crapshoot of a roadside bar. Dewall, Reggie's cousin and cook partner, refuses to work with Rust: "There's a darkness in you, son." Rust could give approximately zero fucks about DeWall's on point perception of his character; when DeWall leaves, Hart tails him and radios the location of Dewall's truck when he dumps it. They meet up and Rust, an expert tracker (thanks, weird survivalist dad), leads the way through the bayou after DeWall. They avoid a few booby traps and explosives and descend on the house-slash-meth-lab. In the future, Rust and Hart will tell a story about how they did so under great peril to their own lives - that they were being fired on by automatic weaponry and only managed to survive by luck and skill.

This is what actually happens: they get to the house. Marty checks the house while Rust checks the barn. There he finds a trailer with two missing children - a little girl, alive, and a little boy's body. Meanwhile, Marty has apprehended Ledoux. Rust joins him outside - tells Marty to check the barn; while Marty's gone, Ledoux treats Rust to some nihilistic bullshit about 'time being a flat circle' and saying 'soon they'll meet in Carcosa.' Rust tells him to shut the fuck up, Nietzsche. --Which is when Marty returns from the barn and blows Ledoux's brains out with a shot to the back of the head. DeWall, spooked by the shot, flees the nearby lab. Before Rust can fire on him, he runs across one of his own booby traps and is blown to pieces. In order to cover up Ledoux's execution, Ledoux is uncuffed and Rust takes an AK-47 from the barn and sprays the area with bullets to later give their concocted story of heroism credence.

They collect the children from the trailer and make their way out of the woods. At the station, they're treated as heroes. They'll be given commendations, promotions and it won't be until years later during an interrogation that Rust will discover they got the wrong guy.

✖ Character Personality: In the words of Martin Hart, a 'smart and steady guy is hard to find'; while Martin claims to have the steady part down, he gives Rust the smart end of things. These assigned traits are something neither man proves himself to be entirely in ownership of, but for an overview it works: Rust? Is smart, sharp - he's intuitive, is good at analyzing facts and figuring out which leads to chase, which strings to pull. He's a good man to have in the interrogation room, on the crime scene -- but he sure as hell ain't as steady as he looks.

In fact Rust is defined by his lack of stability, his changeability. Despite a steady stream of nihilism 101 that insists he has no attachment to the world and what happens in it, he is in fact deeply motivated by his perception of what's right and wrong. He judges the shortcomings of his fellow man while simultaneously making mistakes of his own; he insists that guilt and absolution are social constructs while grappling for his own version of peace in the wake of his daughter's death; he claims the best thing humanity could do would be to stop propagating and die off - and then fights to recover missing children and find justice for murdered women; he condemns violence and then uses it as a tool to get what he wants. Ultimately Rust claims to be "a witness" or "the bad man at the door" tasked with subjugating other, (worse?) men - though he strives to disengage himself from the universe, in reality Rustin Cohle is mired in it.

If it sounds like Rust is a bit of an asshole, well then you're heading down the right path. And while it would be easy to pin his bad behavior on having read one too much Nietzsche in high school, the truth is that despite his ability to get information out of suspects and witnesses Rust is basically fundamentally bad at people. His relationships are largely informed by trauma or neglect (sometimes both). His childhood - his dad knocked up his mom before going to fight in Vietnam and on his return, Rust's mother bailed on them. Rust's dad moved them up to Alaska where Rust grew up in the wilderness, raised by his father who'd turned into something of a survivalist nut after the war. When he got old enough, he moved back to Texas and his dad never forgave him for it - informs his own perception of parenthood, the responsibility of fathers to their children. His own father's perceived lack of warmth, coupled with abandonment issues, may be part of why Rust blames himself for the death of his daughter despite the fact that at no point in time does it ever seem that he's complicit in her death. Between that and his relationship with women - Rust is unable to keep a relationship together for any length of time, blaming it on the fact that he's "difficult" -, it's no wonder why he's so uncomfortable with Martin's cheating (though he might insist otherwise).

He attempts to hold himself at a distance from other people as a self preservation technique - one that he's spectacularly bad at keeping up. Rustin Cohle, despite insisting otherwise, is desperate for human connection. It's how he goes from not talking to Marty (despite having been partners for a number of months at the beginning of the series, he has evidently said next to nothing to the other man) to spilling his whole life story. It's why he treats Maggie with so much respect and kindness even if his views of women tends to boil down to 'virgin' 'whore' and 'woman on a pedestal'. So while his PTSD might be a result of his daughter's death and his time spent undercover, at no point has Rust been what anyone might consider well socialized. Instead he copes with philosophy, a bizarrely complicated relationship with religion - he pretty much says that religion is for chumps who wants to think there's more to life than just being born, making shitty decisions and dying (spoilers: he's that person; Rustin Cohle wants to think there's more to life than all of that) -, addiction, and aggression as a means to an end. All that said, Rust's combative personality and poor people skills are less to do with not knowing how to act (he can be perfectly sociable when he needs to be), but rather born of difficulties he has with his own self worth. His interrogation techniques are evidence enough of this: Rust gets information for suspects through empathy and by offering absolution, two things which he consistently denies himself.

Rust is all about simultaneously taking responsibility for actions/events and disassociation with the physical world that he lives in. His need to understand the universe is symptomatic both of his guilt (often for things he may not be directly responsible for or able to stop) and of his inability to engage with reality. His synesthesia, his addiction induced hallucinations, his desperate attempts to reduce the universe and his place in it into something that can be categorized serve only to hold him at a distance from actually understanding the human condition that he's experiencing.

✖ Character Powers & Skills: Rust has no powers to speak of - he's a normal human from our version of Earth. He does, however, have a number of weird and varied skills - Rust is extremely observant, exceedingly well read in the fields of crime and philosophy, and generally has a skill for knowing how to manipulate people into telling the truth. From his childhood in the Alaskan wilderness, he's an excellent survivalist - knows how to navigate and is a more than proficient tracker and bow hunter. He's a good shot and a scrappy fighter, the latter of which benefits greatly from his utter lack of self preservation instinct. Mostly Rust is whip smart and that gets him through a lot of things he otherwise wouldn't be able to handle.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
✖ First Person POV: Test Drive - Tess | (continuation) | Test Drive - Top Level

✖ Third Person POV:

There is a liquor store not far from his house and after the paperwork's all done, after the photogs have taken their pictures and the press release is wrapped, it's where he goes. There's some talk floating around about the hole in the back of Ledoux's head; he expects that's something they'll have to manage, but right now all anyone cares about is the fact that the man who killed that girl in Erath and put her on display isn't going to do it again, won't steal any babies out of their cribs, won't paint pentagrams on anyone's door. No one gives a shit about Reggie Ledoux or whether he needed a bullet in his head, just like no one really cared about Marie Fontenot until it was convenient.

The woman behind the counter rings up two bottles of Jameson. The man behind him in line clears his throat - does it twice before Rust figures he's trying to get his attention though he doesn't bother to give it until he's paid and the clerk's slid the bottle into a paper bag.

"Is there something I can help you with?" Which is all low, Texan drawl - polite enough even as he's itching to get to his truck and on the dark road where he can take a slug off the whiskey where no one will see.

The man isn't thin or fat - average height, average build, average face. "You're one of the guys who closed that big case they were talking about on the news."

Rust doesn't think it's really a question, but he treats it like one anyway. "That's right."

"I bet you wish you'd gotten there sooner. Saved that boy."

Rust folds his wallet into his back pocket. He takes his bottle, the hard glass edge grating over the counter through the bag. There's no reason to dignify that with any kind of answer, much less the truth, but he carried that boy out and it's been a long day of talking more than he feels sure of, telling people half truths. He fixes the man with a long, flat look. "Yes sir," he says.

Which is all it takes.

CHARACTER ITEMS.
✖ Pick a Team:

RED: Rust is not only a chameleon, but one that is predisposed - either by nature or inclination - to curb conflict with violence. He's worked undercover for years , knows how and when to keep his mouth shut, is a keen observer of (human) nature and doesn't hesitate from taking action when it's deemed necessary.

ORANGE: He's a detective and a good one - means that he's good at the beat work of checking leads and numbers and facts, which theoretically would make him pre-disposed to the intelligent use of resources and strategy.

✖ Reason for Joining the CDC: Strictly speaking, Rust doesn't really have a reason for joining up with the CDC - a man asks him a question, he answers yes and here he is. That said, Rust is something of an opportunist - he takes what he's given and does his best to keep going and finding himself doing bad things for a largely faceless organization isn't exactly new to him. So he'll do what he's always done: find a way to "do some good" despite the inevitability of corruption and greed in the universe. And if he finds a way to pull a few strings and fuck the CDC over without getting Earth blown off the map in the process-- well, he'll keep his eyes open.

✖ Mission Freebie: He'll get back to them.
✖ Personal Item or Weapon: A large black ledger, largely filled by case notes.

✖ Character Inventory:

1 pair of slacks
1 dress shirt
1 ugly corduroy jacket
1 tie
1 white undershirt
1 pair of dress shoes
1 belt
1 wristwatch
1 Louisiana state police shield
1 Louisiana state police badge (confiscated)
1 wallet and personal effects (confiscated)
1 bottle of whiskey (confiscated)
1 9mm pistol (confiscated)
1 pocket holster (confiscated)
2x 9mm clips (confiscated)