aworldonfire | application for teleios

Player Info

Name: Alishia
Age: 31
Contact: knightinqs
Characters Already in Teleios: Bruce Banner (The Hulk); Cassandra Pentaghast; Dylan Rhodes; I'seth
Reserve: Here.

Character Basics:

Character Name: Matt Murdock (Daredevil)
Journal: aworldonfire
Age: No canon age is given for Matt, however based on a series of flashbacks to his college life, it's probably safe to assume that he's in his late twenties or early thirties.
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: Near the end of Daredevil (1x13), after hanging up the new Nelson & Murdock sign with Foggy and Karen.
Debt:
Class A: 3 years
Murder (Nobu; despite Matt not feeling at fault for what happened to Nobu, he is still the one that set him on fire, leading to his death)
Espionage (gathering information on Union Allied and Wilson Fisk by underhanded means)

Class B: 53 years
Assault (multiple counts; so many)
Theft (multiple counts)
Breaking and Entering (multiple counts)
Fraud (pretending to be more blind than he actually is over the course of several years)

Class C: 8 years, 10 months
Attempted Murder (Wilson Fisk)
Causing Mass Mayhem & Panic (most notably after the Russian's holdings in Hell's Kitchen went up in flames)
Conspiracy to Commit a Crime (multiple counts; discussing his plans with Father Lantom on more than one occasion)
Escaping Custody (two counts; both times when he was cornered and almost arrested by the police)
Fleeing the Scene of a Crime (multiple counts)
Property Damage (multiple counts)
Stalking (Vanessa Marianna)
Threatening Death (multiple counts; generally a case of telling bad guys "If you don't change your ways, I'll find you again and beat you to death" after kicking their ass)
Torture (multiple counts; most notably, torturing Semyon on the roof of Claire Temple's apartment)
Traumatizing Your Loved Ones (multiple counts; mostly related to not answering his phone when the shit's hitting the fan, if only because he's knee-deep in said shit, and Foggy finding him unconscious after his fight with Nobu)
Tresspassing (multiple counts)
Underage Drinking (before stitching his father up when he was nine)
Vigilantism (multiple counts; again, so, so many)

Created Crimes:
Excessive Force (multiple counts; also known as "Matt. Matt, you can probably stop hitting that guy. He's already unconscious. Matt, stahp.")

GRAND TOTAL: 64 years, 10 months

Canon Character Section:

History:
Here.

Personality:
On the surface, Matt comes across as an honestly nice guy. While perhaps giving the impression of being an introvert for how often he seems to retreat thoughtfully into his own mind in the middle of conversation and in quiet moments alike (usually because he's slipped off into thinking about vigilante business), he's genuinely charming when he does join in, putting people at ease as he always seems to know the right thing to say. He has an easy, albeit somewhat sarcastic sense of humor (him telling a client that he and his law partner had practicing for only seven hours upon their first meeting comes to mind) that often turns to his own disability, as he's obviously comfortable enough with it and himself to make jokes at his own expense, and as a means of diffusing tension or banishing any awkwardness there might be when people slip around him, forgetting that he's not capable of sight.

More than that, beyond being an honestly nice guy, he comes across as being just an honest guy, refusing to compromise his morality to serve the criminal element of New York just for the sake of a paycheck and despite being a defense attorney. No, he has a strong sense of justice, stemming in part from his religion (as a devout Catholic, Matt believes in doing the right thing, no matter what the personal or professional cost to himself -- things are a little iffier, when his friends are involved, if only because he can't stand the idea of seeing them hurt) and in part from the fact that he's simply seen too many good people have the worst happen to them, his father, when he was a child, included. He cares very deeply, keeps his promises as best he can when he makes them; he's a protector, even on the surface and despite what he does with his nights off, and more often than not, it tends to earn him fast, loyal friends. He's the kind of guy you can tell anything to and know that he'll do anything to help you out -- or at very least keep your secrets to himself.

Digging deeper, however, Matt is nowhere near as harmless as he makes himself out to be. While, true, he's still a champion of the little guy, even when acting as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen (or, more recently, Daredevil), he goes about it much more violently, the time for professionalism and words at an end. He believes that sometimes the law just isn't enough, for all its loopholes and for how often the good people get railroaded just because they can't afford to seek help, and that sometimes, you just need to go intimidate or punch your way through to reach a fair conclusion. (Sometimes, you just need to beat the shit out of the father abusing his daughter, in order to convince him to stop and when Child Services can't or won't do anything to help, for example.)

Matt's quiet propensity for violence isn't always about doing the right thing, however -- as many characters in the series have called him on, he enjoys fighting scumbags, his upset with the inequity of the city, his temper running much hotter than he leads people to believe. If you're on the wrong side of the right-wrong line, he will nail you to a wall, and if he can't do that in a courtroom, he'll do it with his fists. Bad people need to be made to understand they can't screw with the little guy, they need to be made to pay, where the people that murdered his father never did.

While it would be easy, now, to label him a thug or a psychopath, taking the law into his own hands, however, Matt refuses to kill (and won't let someone die on his watch, either, even if they're not on the level, as was the case with Vladimir Ranskahov), and more often than not, struggles with his violent urges after the fact. Is he doing the right thing in the eyes of God? Is he no better than the people he deals with as Daredevil? It's the fact that he thinks to ask these questions, that Catholic guilt, that probably keeps him from becoming the monster he has a real fear of devolving into. His friends, and his priest, Father Lantom, help with that, too, pulling him back from the edge when he creeps too close to it. Without his support system, he could very easily cross that line, and the guilt that followed would probably destroy him worse than anything any real thug with a gun or knife could ever do to him. And while this could be a problem, in Teleios, him being stripped of that support, he'll hopefully find someone to replace Foggy and Karen, his heart and his drive, before too long -- until then, he'll just have to keep reminding himself that anything too dark would not be something condoned by his faith.

Powers/Abilities:
They say that, when you lose one sense, your body heightens the remaining ones as a means of compensation. For Matt, this is absolutely true, and to a superhuman level, thanks to the effects of the chemicals that caused his blindness in the first place. While for anyone else, this might be just as crippling as being blind, however (imagine trying to do anything when you can hear bugs crawling around in the dirt outside, when your sheets feel like sandpaper on your skin for how soft they really aren't, and so on and so forth), thanks to his training with Stick as a child, he has honed these senses into a finely tuned weapon as good as, if not better than, his missing sight.

Individually, he's capable of the following things with his remaining, heightened senses:

Hearing: Matt can and has used this ability to eavesdrop on conversations across a room or judge the number of people in said room by following heartbeats. He has been known to use his hearing to gauge the physical well-being of friends and enemies alike, again, able to focus on heartbeats and breathing to make sure someone is still alive, or noting that someone has a broken bone just by how it sounds when they move. He can tell, without fail, when someone is lying to him, based on the cadence of their heart and the sound of their voice, and knew something was wrong with Karen, near the end of the season, just by the subtleties of her inflection. He also uses his hearing to great effect, while tracking people, able to focus on their personal sounds (the sound of James Westley's watch, for example) to the exclusion or at least muting of all others.
Smell: In canon, Matt was able to pinpoint someone's location, several floors above him and through several walls, based on the smell of their cologne and cigarettes. He could tell his partner had had onions for lunch, a few days previous, or that he had spent time with their secretary recently, based on the lingering smell of her perfume. He knew that a man was dying of cancer, just based on his personal and probably obviously wrong scent, and so on and so forth.
Taste: Notably, Matt could tell when Claire had reopened her stitches, after the beating she suffered at the hands of the Russians, by catching the taste of her blood in the air.
Touch: Most of Matt's spatial awareness comes from this, allowing him to judge distances, feel where an object is, and dodge projectiles based on how the air feels as it moves around him and others. He can sense the body temperatures of others (so, even without accounting for his other senses, he might be able to tell he wasn't alone in a room, just based on the difference in heat signatures) and can follow vibrations, such as those caused by footsteps, to tell where someone else is in relation to him.

Certain things may still be beyond him (like telling the color of something, or being able to read something on printed paper because modern printing techniques leave no impressions he can follow), but all put together, they create, paraphrased from his own words, an impression of sight, not unlike a world on fire. It's what allows him to operate as a vigilante, and it at least helps with his natural charm when it comes to flirting and friendship.

While these abilities are, as previously mentioned, superhuman in nature, however, Matt won't be entirely crippled, in entering Teleios. He may not be winning any fights he starts or jumping off any buildings, without, but he still years of training to fall back on. He still might be able to tell when someone is lying to him, for example, by listening for any suspicious pauses or out of place words in their speech. He might be able to find a door, albeit at a much shorter distance, without fumbling for it, by feeling out where the air currents change, for another. (Seriously, go stand by a doorway, close your eyes, and tell the writer that you can't feel a difference in the way the air moves.) Long story short, he can and will cope.

Finally, in terms of mundane abilities, Matt is, if not an accomplished lawyer from lack of experience, at least possessing of the ability to be one, having graduated summa cum laude from Columbia Law in New York. He is a well-trained martial artist, incorporating many forms into his fighting style, and acrobat, and has decent deductive reasoning skills that help him tackle cases on both a legal and vigilante front beyond just hitting someone until they give him the information he needs. He knows a number of meditation tricks that help him shrug off pain in a fight and heal faster, afterwards -- not a true healing factor, in the case of the latter, not superhuman, but enough that his injuries don't look as bad as they should, which helps him keep going even after a bad fight or spin a story to explain why a blind guy has all those cuts and bruises. He can't have a punctured lung if it heals so quickly, right? Something like that would keep a person down for days, right? Right. And lastly, Matt speaks Spanish fluently.

Appearance: Standing 5'10", Matt is well-built in spite of his day job, thanks to all the training and vigilante work he's done over the years. He has brown hair, worn short, and more often that not sports a five o'clock shadow. His eyes are also brown, more often than not unfocused if only because he is truly blind, and usually hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. He tends to dress well, in suits befitting of what one might expect of a lawyer -- or, when he's acting as Daredevil, in a red and black suit of body armor, a step up from the black nylon and mask he wore up until recently.

Samples:
Actionspam Sample:
Here. (If you want to skip about ten comments worth of exposition and action, the actual dialogue starts here.)

Prose Sample:
Here.