you're not a hero | mask or menace

[hypercompetent]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Sisi
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: melocoton
IM / EMAIL: inquisitioned @ AIM | sasslinskis @ yahoo
PLURK: asterisms
RETURNING: Newbie! (Although I was at C&C for a hot second.)

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: "Stiles" Stilinski
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Teen Wolf (2011)
CHRONOLOGY: 3x15 "Galvanize" life is hard when your character's the possessed villain and you don't know if he's ever gonna be ok again
CLASS: Hero.
HOUSING: Opt in for randoms sounds great! ♥

BACKGROUND:

first off; a history.

In order to fully define Stiles and the universe he's in, I figured I'd include some basics about his world and the people most important to him, alongside the link above! So without further ado--

♦ BEACON HILLS, CALIFORNIA

is the setting for Teen Wolf. Beacon Hills is a sleepy little suburb nestled neatly in Northern California. Teen Wolf is set in 2011 and onward--as such, he's perfectly familiar with all sorts of modern day things, from comics to TV shows to technology to how to drive a car. It all started when Stiles decided he and his best friend Scott McCall1 were going to go and investigate a dead body. (Stiles' idea, surprising no one.) They ended up getting caught by the police--aka, Stiles' father2--and while he led Stiles away by the ear, Scott was bitten by the thing that had killed the girl they found in the woods; a werewolf.

How did this effect Stiles, you ask? It changed his life, because it changed Scott's life. Stiles immediately threw himself into researching lycanthropy, old books and google included, and became Scott's human sidekick. Don't get him wrong though. Stiles' new life with the supernaturally inclined is not all peaches and cream. In fact, it kind of sucks. A lot. The months after Scott got bitten have culminated in him getting injured more times than he can count--granted, half of these things are because he couldn't shut his mouth and stop sassing the villains, but. He's harbored a criminal (who wasn't really a criminal, but Scott and Stiles kind of got him arrested--getting back to that whole hare brained scheme thing.), hacked into a computer with someone else's help, been kidnapped by a megalomaniac alpha and, oh yeah, got to dance with the girl of his dreams. Despite living what is probably about four months in a constant state of hypervigiliance and terror--did he mention terror?--he did get Lydia Martin3 to actually learn his name. Granted, she's madly in love with someone else, but she at least knows who he is, and the potential for something along the lines of friendship instead of what is borderline celebrity worship is great to form in the future.

But that can only occur after Peter Hale, the megalomaniac alpha from before, gets his claws in her--literally. Stiles practically begs Peter to leave Lydia alone, and it's in that that the series reveals Stiles' cleverness--how he was able to figure out where Derek Hale4 (and by proxy, Kate Argent--the real big baddie of the season) were hiding out by a cellphone signal. Peter obviously took notice of this, because after leading Stiles through a multitude of ridiculous things and what amounts to, yes, kidnapping, he offers Stiles the bite. The power his friends had. Never being the sidekick.

He turns it down.

The reason isn't stated in canon, but Dylan O'Brien covered later that he didn't want to take it because of his dad. He'd seen the strain the bite had put on Scott and his mother--Scott and most of his friends--and putting that on his dad after all the hell they went through would have been too much. And so, life moved on. Derek became the alpha. Scott and Allison were madly in love, and Stiles still had his best friend and pretty good prospects with Lydia (maybe).

But this is Stiles' life, and nothing can get better after that. The phrase "kanima" begins to get tossed around as what amounts to literally a lizard monster that's somebody's murderpuppet starts merrily killing people in town. Stiles gets his first taste of Jackson 2.0 (although he doesn't know it's Jackson--no one does) because he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gets paralyzed by the kanima's venom from the neck down for the first time. Yes, I said first time. The kanima continues to terrorize the good people of Beacon Hills, and the great mystery of the season becomes heavily entwined around the teenagers involved. Stiles starts to have to lie to his dad as he shows up at more and more crime scenes, straining their relationship to the point that when all of the teenagers are affected by a hallucinatory version of wolfsbane, Stiles sees his father telling him his mother's death5 was his fault, and that he's killing his father, too.

By the time they solve the mystery of the kanima, Stiles has been paralyzed twice, kidnapped, beaten up, and watched the girl of his dreams tell another boy she loves him, and saved his life by doing so. Things aren't so hot in Beacon Hills, even by the time the third season starts; Stiles comes back with a new haircut and a whole new set of enemies-by-proxy, a pack of alphas. Yeah. This is Teen Wolf, guys.

Right off the bat, he decides he's going to get over Lydia, and ends up making out with another girl, who wants to finally help him lose his virginity...only for her to get snatched and brutally murdered before it can actually happen. The bodies start piling up in Beacon Hills and Stiles is not just a bystander but a center piece, as first virgins start getting killed--"I need someone, to sex me, right now!", and then healers, and then eventually, someone attempts to kill off the werewolves, too. It culminates in Scott McCall being so twisted up on wolfsbane that he makes an suicide attempt, and Stiles is the only one who can talk him down from it, because they're brothers, best friends for life and probably more than that.

Luckily, Stiles talks him down. And so, Mystery Inc: Beacon Hills continues to try and understand what the fuck is happening, considering the alpha pack makes it very clear that they're not sacrificing people. Turns out that honor belongs to the darach--a "dark druid". A darach is an emissary, or a pack advisor, but one that's gone, well, dark side, and this darach turns out to be all over getting her own power in order to...take over Beacon Hills or something. Stiles doesn't really know.

What he does know is that in order to complete her little trifecta of power, she chose "guardians" as her next order of sacrifice. And who are her guardians? Parents!

Like Stiles' father.

Panicked and freaked out, team Beacon Hills has to race against the clock--find the darach (who we learn quickly is actually their English teacher, one Jennifer Blake) and stop her from sacrificing their parents and gaining cray cray amounts of power. In order to do so, Stiles, Allison and Scott have to sacrifice themselves to the power of an ancient tree called the Nemeton, which is where Jennifer has been committing her own sacrifices in order to leech off of its supernatural power. By sacrificing themselves, even for a short time, they negate the ones that their parents could have become, but Stiles, Allison and Scott all suffer major consequences as they "die" for about three hours.

But more on that later. The parents are saved, Stiles gets into a car accident because his actor was filming The Maze Runner during the finale, and 3A ends with things in a very, very tenous balance. Jennifer is defeated, by the combined might of Scott and Derek, and the alpha pack disappears, unsatisfied with their attempt to grab Derek or Scott for their evil ministrations and missing several members, and things are somewhat okay.

Except remember those side effects? Those come into play during 3B. Stiles begins to have horrific nightmares--we learn that he's not been sleeping, as he only dreams of the nemeton and can't seem to differentiate the ability between reality and dreams. He has panic attacks and ends up reverting to not sleeping at all, mentioning that the only way he can tell the difference between reality and the dreams is by counting fingers.

Stiles loses the ability to read and focus--his intelligence becomes his greatest weakness as he nearly gets Lydia killed because he can't read the damn instructions on how to release her from a bear trap she managed to get stuck in.

It's not until team Teen Wolf helps to bring back a young girl trapped in the body of a coyote that Stiles regains his ability to read--in a tearful scene where he looks at his dad succeeding in returning the girl to her father and then looks into the side mirror of his dad's cruiser, reading the text at the bottom of it. Things seem back to normal, at least temporarily--the next day, Stiles is up at midnight pulling a prank on Coach Finstock for Mischief Night, grinning and laughing and making a fool of himself.

The only problem is, he finds himself with a key that he didn't even know he had. In fact, he's never seen it before.

And when a serial killer gets on the loose inside Beacon Hills High School, people wonder how he managed to get in--he was found in the chemistry lab, mixing chemicals for a bomb.

It takes Stiles the next episode to discover exactly what happened--but as it stands, that is currently beyond his canon point. For now, he's standing with no sleep, a shaky hold on his sanity, and a key in his hand that he has no idea what to do with.

THE PEOPLE

♦ 1. SCOTT MCCALL

It's kind of a running joke in the show, as well as in the fandom, that Scott and Stiles are pretty much one entity. They take attached at the hip to a whole new level, because Stiles literally never does anything without Scott, even taking his best friend's lycanthropy on as his personal project. Stiles is the knowledge to back up Scott's bravery, the Robin to his Batman, and the jelly to his peanut butter, and an existence without Scott is literally almost impossible to fathom; when talking down Scott from his suicide attempt, he literally quotes, "I need you, Scott. You're my best friend. You're my brother, okay?" and breaks the heart of fandom everywhere.

♦ 2. SHERIFF STILINSKI

The most important person in Stiles' life is, bar none, his father. After the death of his mother, the sheriff is really all that Stiles has left in the world. He's his role model and his world, and Stiles is fiercely protective of his father, to the point where he has to lie to him often to try and keep the big werewolf secret away from him. That has put a major strain on their relationship, in that the sheriff doesn't think he can trust his son anymore, and that breaks Stiles' heart, but he thinks it's for the best.

It is. He told the sheriff in 3x09, and not only did he not believe him? But he got kidnapped by the main baddie, too.

♦ 3. LYDIA MARTIN

Oh Lydia. Lydia Martin is the girl of Stiles' dreams. He's had a crush on her since the third grade, and she just recently actually started talking to him, which tells you how pretty much hopeless this crush is. Stiles adores Lydia and would do pretty much anything to keep her safe--he details how if anything happened to her, he would "literally lose his mind". The two of them are similar in a lot of ways, and Stiles endlessly admires her brilliance and beauty, even if she's also like fifty percent evil and would step on his heart with a perfectly sharpened stiletto.

She's a major part of his life, even though she's just barely started to enter it.

♦ 4. DEREK HALE

How does one even begin to describe Derek Hale? Jackson Whittemore told him he was pretty. Derek burst into Stiles' life like a hurricane, because he got so intrinsically involved with Scott that Stiles was pretty much the package deal. They have a strange relationship; Derek spends a lot of time empty threatening Stiles, who blows it off and gets in his face and tries to pretend he's not totally terrified. The two of them have built up a sort of rapport that started with violence, but in the past year in Beacon Hills has started to become an alliance, if not a friendship. They're locked in this thing of mutual life saving, and because of that, even if Stiles talks about disliking the guy, he's, somehow, become someone in the field of people he does care about.

You wouldn't just chop off someone's arm for them if they asked if you didn't care, right?

♦ 5. CLAUDIA STILINSKI

We know so little about Stiles' mother. However, her entire existence is a major impact on Stiles' life, simply because she passed away when he was eight years old of a disease called frontotemporal dementia. Stiles took his mother's death incredibly hard. He's mentioned having severe panic attacks afterwards, and was thrown into a state of general depression, in that he wasn't really the wisecracking teenager we know now. He's only just now starting to get over it, and it's discussed that he might have kept his hair in a buzzcut in her memory.

PERSONALITY:

Stiles Stilinski is kind of like his car. Where two of his friends drive a Porsche and a Camaro, Stiles drives a beat up, vintage blue jeep.

Quirky to put it nicely, a weird loser otherwise, Stiles is sixteen years old and 140 pounds of sheer sarcasm, the human companion (not sidekick, thank you) to his werewolf best friend and his merry band of lunatics, and more or less the brains of the operation. Aside from his unique furry companions and the trouble they get him into, he’s your typical teenager—-generally cheerful, nerdy as anything, and with an attention span the size of a gnat’s. Stiles is more than he seems, however. Behind his clumsy, awkward, benchwarmer exterior lies an incredibly quick mind and a natural gift for solving puzzles and finding answers. Once he finds something that interests him, Stiles will research it to death, sucking up every bit of information that comes along with it like a sponge. He put together the clues to reveal that all of the murders in Beacon Hills had to do with an arson six years in the past before the people involved, and most of the time, he’s two steps ahead of everyone else in how they think—-if people ignore him, it usually turns out that he was right all along. His methods of extraction aren’t always normal (getting his father drunk to get him to spill information about a case, for example), but they’re effective—one part quick thinking and two parts Stilinski stubbornness does the trick. Despite the fact that Stiles is one of three humans, and certainly the only one with zero apparent supernatural powers or otherwise offensive talents, in his group, Scott would probably be dead without him. He’s a Hyper-Competent Sidekick, so much so that Derek occasionally borrows him for the same purpose.

The creepy crawlies in his life make Stiles jumpy and hypervigilant often, however, and he’s known to jump at just about anything that startles him, occasionally complete with girly very manly screaming. And while when it comes to heroics, Stiles is always the Robin, when someone needs a hero in a clutch, he can come through, although he second guesses this ability and downplays it. He’s brave, despite being a bit of a scaredy cat; while Stiles can be scared of a million different things, he’s almost never intimidated. Stiles will stand up to every monster that walks in front of him, including nearly running his jeep into a lizard monster to cause a distraction. More than anything in his life, Stiles runs on a basal need to protect the people he loves, but when you're surrounded by creatures of the supernatural and you're just a regular human, that can be hard. He struggles with feeling useless in his circle, and in one instance, he has to watch his dad get socked in the face while there's absolutely nothing he can do about it. This need to protect probably comes from his cop father, to be honest, and Stiles does literally whatever he can to stand up to anything that tries to attack his friends or family, be it a monster or just a megalomaniac grandfather. ”Standing up”, however, often includes a comment or six from his smart mouth; one of the consequences of his razor sharp wit is a bitingly sarcastic backlash that tends to hit in all the right (or really, all the wrong) places. He can be callous—in fact, he’s really not always that nice of a guy, particularly when it’s his emotions pushing his mouth to speak.

However, when it comes to being a friend, Stiles is one of the better ones. His loyalty is fierce and strong to his best friend, Scott, and he’d do literally anything to help him—as of right now, he’s one of exactly two people who know his secret. As a lifelong loser, he has a very small, tight knit group of people that are literally his world, and it’s only recently started growing. On the one hand there’s his family; Stiles lost his mother sometime in 2011, and the grief of that tightened the bond that he has to his dad greatly. Stiles and his father are extremely close, despite displaying your typical father and teenage son behavior—he denies the werewolf bite because he knows his father needs him. Stiles makes sure that his father watches what he eats to stay healthy, and Sheriff Stilinski does his best to keep Stiles safe. Beyond his father is Scott, his best (and as implied) only friend; the two of them are more or less joined at the hip, and Stiles barely even flinches when he learns about Scott’s becoming a werewolf. Nothing changes between them, and if nothing, Stiles takes on the opportunity to research and help Scott with his problems, furry or not. It’s actions like chaining him up for the full moon, or letting the girl he loved go find the boy she loved when he’d finally gotten a date with her (hint: that boy was not, and will never be, him) that show Stiles’ incredible care for those around him, no matter what they do.

Stiles loves to talk, though. In fact, once Stiles starts talking, he keeps talking. And talking. And talking. He has something to say about everything and it tends to get him in trouble, considering he can’t seem to turn on his brain to mouth filter during life threatening situations. His natural curiosity leads him to have a practical inbred resistance to the word “no”, and chances are if you specifically ask him not to do something, he’ll turn around and do it, unless you’ve managed to frighten him. (And even then.) He acts without thinking often, part of his Word of God diagnosed ADHD, and he’s impulsive enough to do things that benefit him, such as making a copy of a key to Scott’s house, without really thinking about why they could be wrong. (To Scott’s mother’s credit, she wasn’t surprised at all.) Sometime during the last year he was plagued with awful panic attacks, brought on by his mother’s death—it’s a quiet fact that he blames himself for her death, although it’s not clear exactly how she died yet. He’s self deprecating and overly happy when things go his way, because it doesn’t happen often; when it does, he usually celebrates, and occasionally doesn’t even know what to do with himself until his brain can connect with the actual fact of it.

The most important fact of all, however, is that Stiles is sixteen, and he acts like it. His emotional decisions can be rash, he has a gigantic crush on a girl that makes him follow her around like a puppy even as she continues to stomp on his heart, and sometimes his decisions are prioritized based on what feels the most important to his teenage brain. But ultimately, what makes Stiles so useful indeed (despite what he might think) is his quick mind, his willingness to go the distance for the people he loves, and his big heart.

POWER:

In canon, it's discussed that Stiles has some sort of "spark". He's told that the only way he can make a certain thing work is by believing in it and he thinks it's pretty much bullshit until it actually works. His superpower here in the city is going to be expanding on that; the idea of believing in something so hard it simply happens. Naturally, it's volatile, especially for Stiles, who tends to be self-deprecating in his best moments, but if he wanted, say, to imagine that he was going to have an extra bag of french fries, he might have an extra bag of french fries.

The point of this power is ingenuity. It's not much on it's own, but Stiles is the kind of person who's better at building skyscrapers with his mind than with his hands; eventually I'd like him to work into wards or similar things based in the Celtic magic that his canon features.

I'd also like him to have the ability to "charmspeak"; that is, powers of persuasion. Words have power and all that jazz.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
this is a post from C&C!
barring that i can also offer any number of regular musebox threads and/or write something else! c:


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
The thing about being the only human in a group full of supernaturally inclined friends was that you learn to improvise. Stiles Stilinski has always thought he's pretty damn good at thinking on the fly--one time, he stopped Scott from wolfing out on him by spraying him with a fire extinguisher--and despite the fact that he's apparently now equipped with superpowers, that's something that's not going to leave him anytime soon.

So Stiles had challenged his best friend in the world, Scott, to a game of hide and seek. Scott had scoffed at him almost immediately, but because he was Scott, he'd agreed, even magnanimously given Stiles a thirty minute head start, and that's where Stiles is now, holding a sharp knife in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. He stares at a tree in the park for a minute, flicks his gaze back and forth from the paper and the tree trunk, then carefully plants the knife in the tree, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Have to believe, have to believe that his research is right, that this is going to help him.

Carefully, Stiles draws the knife down the tree trunk so it creates a single line, and mutters under his breath, "I believe this is going to cover my ass."

So it's not the most eloquent statement, but it's Stiles, and it works. The teenager carefully slides through the forest and puts it on another tree,then another, then another, until he's built up a square of trees, each one marked with the isa rune, practically unnoticable unless he pointed them out.

There's a sudden thundering of footsteps and Stiles winces, but stands in the middle of his hastily thrown together circle, repeating it over and over and over in his head, I believe I believe I believe I believe--, and then, the footsteps suddenly divert another direction.

Stiles cracks an eye open and looks around. Scott's not dropping in on him. Scott ran right past him.

"--Yes! Oh my god!" Throwing his arms in the air, he makes a celebratory whoop, jumping in the air, then abruptly covers his mouth with his hands when he hears a "Stiles?" from a little ways outside.

Go figure he'd ruin it with his big mouth.

FINAL NOTES: