PLAYER
Name: Tess
Over 18: Y
Contact: [plurk.com profile] nonhoration | discord: nonhoration#9268 | DM character journal
Current Characters: N/A

CHARACTER
Name: Chloe Frazer
Journal: [personal profile] desperate_times_right
Age: 38
Canon: Uncharted
Canon point: Post Lost Legacy
Abilities: Chloe has no supernatural abilities.

In terms of regular human skills, Chloe is described by multiple characters as the “best driver in the business” and is skilled at city driving in both chase and stealth scenarios and off-road navigation in wilderness areas. She can pick locks quickly in high-stress situations and has a knack for solving logic puzzles (surprisingly common in tombs and temples). She never actually pickpockets anyone in the games but when Meenu tries to pick her pocket in The Lost Legacy she both notices immediately and compliments the girl’s technique so I’m going to say pickpocketing as well. Being a video game character she also has some talent with guns and hand-to-hand combat, though she learned through experience rather than any kind of official training and it shows.

This one isn’t really an ability but I’m putting it in this section in case it counts as a power: in her home universe, Chloe owns a bracelet called the Queen’s Ruby that glows and makes a weird noise when it detects treasure. In-game it was supposed to help the player find all of the collectibles, so its definition of “treasure” is a bit vague.

Personality: A lot of Chloe’s worldview was shaped by the circumstances surrounding her father’s death when she was a child. She felt that he had wasted all of his time and money on fruitless expeditions that had resulted in nothing but his own murder. As a result, until she has reconciled with her father’s legacy she prides herself on being the one who always knows when to walk away. She would walk out of a job in a second with no regrets if it looked like it was going to get too dangerous for too little reward (and does, over the protests of several of her friends, after Charlie is injured in Syria). In Nepal, she tries to leave Elena’s injured cameraman behind since, as she sees it, he’s basically dead anyway and all of the uninjured people in the group are in danger if they get caught by the people chasing them. She later argues with Elena against taking on a fight where they are incredibly outmatched but the fate of the world is at stake because “the world doesn’t care” about their efforts and they’re likely to die anyway. After following in her father’s footsteps and completing his quest to find the Tusk of Ganesh, she finds that she’s tired of putting her own desires first and walking away from others in need and convinces her team to help her undertake what she believes to be a suicide mission to keep the country from being plunged into civil war. When they somehow survive, she also manages to convince them to give the artifact to India’s Ministry of Culture rather than selling it to a more lucrative private collector, which is a decision that would have disgusted her in the past. All this to say that as a recently reformed self-proclaimed "selfish dickhead" she is still learning what it means to be a good person (and to consider herself potentially in that light) and how to handle caring this deeply about what happens to other people.

Chloe likes to think of herself as a lone wolf, free from any attachment to others that could affect her decisions or hold her back. However, the reality is that despite herself she forms very intense connections very quickly with the people she works with who show her that they can be trusted. For example, with Elena she went from outright hostility (Elena was her then-boyfriend’s ex that he’d never gotten over and Chloe’s got some understandable abandonment issues) to carrying her injured body through a very dangerous area to safety during the same adventure. She’s jumped in front of guns to protect both Nathan and Charlie from imminent violence, and the first thing she does after Nadine punches her in the face and declares her untrustworthy is chase after her to protect her from bandits. Watching people she cares about getting hurt is worse to her than getting hurt herself, which is something that at least one villain has taken advantage of to force her to do work for him. Despite all of these attachments, she truly values her freedom, and the idea of being caged somehow or tied down to a single person or location is one that would genuinely frighten her. This is also why she struggles with things like being vulnerable with others or trusting them enough to tell them the whole plan instead of trying to just trick them into doing what she wants.

“Plan” isn’t a word that is really in her vocabulary, which definitely makes her new partnership with the more military-minded Nadine interesting at times. Generally, Chloe comes up with an idea of what she wants the outcome of any situation to be and then wings everything between where she is now and the finish line as it comes to her. This can result in situations where the entire plan is “I’m going to throw this grenade and we’ll see what happens” or cause some significant stress between herself and her new partner when her idea of distracting the enemy leader is to offer to switch sides and work for him instead. At its farthest extreme this leads to unpleasant situations as in Among Thieves where pretty much every man she was involved with believed that he was the only one she really trusted, and she kept having to frantically betray various people and factions to move the metaphorical chess pieces on the board without getting caught.

That description makes it all sound rather serious, but Chloe has always been a “live in the moment” type of person and is sort of constantly delighted to be alive after trying something ridiculous. At one point during her adventure in India she is chasing a runaway train in a Jeep and discovers she’s running out of road, so she ramps the vehicle across the chasm between herself and the train tracks, impacting the side of the train so hard that she briefly loses consciousness. The very first thing she does upon waking up is essentially say, “Oh sweet, it worked!” She’s also one of the biggest adrenaline junkies in the group and is often seen gleefully running headlong into danger.

She generally plays her cards pretty close to her chest and doesn’t give out a lot of information about herself, even to the people she’s close to. In the circumstances where she does reveal something it's usually as a form of repayment, either for having learned something about that person or for having harmed them in some way (for example she tells Nadine the truth about what happened to her father as a sort of payment for having lied to her about Sam). Despite this Chloe loves to talk and will do so at pretty much every opportunity. She chats to everyone she works with while they’re looking around, she chats with animals that she encounters in the jungle, and she even has little one-sided conversations with statues and skeletons while climbing around on them and/or moving them out of the way. She likes bestowing various nicknames and will flirt outrageously at every chance she gets. She’s got a very dry sense of humour and will often try to play off any genuine emotion she might experience in the presence of another person as a joke. Chloe is a practical joker and seems to really enjoy using her position as the treasure hunting expert on the team to try and trick Nadine into believing various scary or unbelievable things are going to happen as they’re exploring.

Canon history: I apologize in advance to whoever has to read this, but the Uncharted wiki sucks.

Chloe was born in India. Frazer is her mother’s surname, but it’s never really made clear if she always used it (because her mother kept her maiden name or never married) or if it was changed as part of her father’s attempts to protect his family later on. Her father was an archaeologist, and his white whale was a Hoysala artifact called the Tusk of Ganesh. He spent most of the family’s money on ventures that turned up nothing and then finally got India’s Ministry of Culture to finance one final expedition, swearing to his family that he was “on to something big”. Big enough to have rivals (this is never elaborated on at all but considering some of the weird things he says to Chloe about her bloodline I’ve always assumed that the rival was Asav, the villain of The Lost Legacy, or an associate of his), since the next thing Chloe knew, she and her mother were being bundled off to Australia because it was “too dangerous” for them to stay in India. Chloe never saw her father alive again. A few weeks after arriving in Australia, she received a small bronze figure of Ganesh in the mail. The next news she heard of her father, he had been found by Indian authorities in his camp, killed by bandits.

She started treasure hunting on her own young, likely in her late teens or early twenties. Determined not to be like her father, she sold her services to the highest bidder and immediately left any job if things looked too dangerous. She also started attaching herself to various men in the business who might be convinced into taking risks on her behalf.

She was already established as a treasure hunter in her own right when she met Nathan Drake. Within an hour of running into him for the first time, she had tried to kill him, rescued him from someone else who was trying to kill him, set off an alarm and blown up a castle, which is indicative of how their entire relationship was going to go. In the end, they got kidnapped, chased by zombies, and almost killed by lava in a cave but Chloe got what she came for, spent the night with Nathan, and drove off into the sunrise. This somehow evolved into a relationship that was serious enough that she was genuinely wounded when he suddenly broke it off and disappeared (presumably to live the events of Drake’s Fortune).

A year or so later, she sought Nathan out again after having insinuated herself into a relationship with Harry Flynn, a former ally of Nathan’s, in order to get in on a heist he was orchestrating that was meant to locate the Cintamani Stone for a war criminal named Lazarevic (it had Properties that he was planning to use to create an invincible army, but no one else knew that). She convinced him to rekindle their relationship, while keeping it a secret from Harry, telling him they would take the money that they earned from the job and disappear together. This began a whirlwind of betrayals and allegiance shifts as Chloe tried to keep Lazarevic and Harry from finding out about her relationship with Nathan while manipulating Nathan into being in the correct places at the right times to keep the stone from falling into villain hands.

In the middle of all of this, they met up with Elena Fisher, Nathan’s love interest from Drake’s Fortune. She was an investigative reporter at the time and was tracking Lazarevic (most believed him to have died in a bombing and she was trying to prove that he was still alive), so she ended up right in the middle of all these events without meaning to. Chloe’s pragmatism and relationship with Nathan immediately cast the two as rivals, however after fighting side by side for a bit the two became friendlier (much to Nathan’s consternation as once they were talking to each other they immediately proceeded to roast him for everything he tried to do).

Eventually, her allegiance to Nathan was discovered by Lazarevic, and Harry (who had been promised Chloe like a prize without her knowledge) was punished by being stabbed a whole bunch of times and given a grenade without a pin, which ended up killing him and seriously wounding Elena. Seeing how much Elena clearly still meant to Nathan at that moment, she carried Elena to safety while Nathan went off to do the boss fight (she tried to convince him not to be a heroic idiot but failed). Once Elena had recovered, Chloe broke things off with Nathan so the two could be together. She coped with this by having a brief affair with his mentor.

Chloe next crossed paths with Nathan about a year later when Charlie Cutter, with whom she was in a semi-serious relationship, invited her on a job where they needed a getaway driver. She stayed on the job post-getaway as they needed to split into two groups to locate the next clues. Nathan’s group went to France and Chloe and Charlie went to Syria, though due to reasons involving bad guys chasing them all four ended up in Syria exploring ruins together.

However, things went downhill when one of the villains shot Charlie with a dart filled with water that had been contaminated by a hallucinogen, causing him to become paranoid and violent. While running from said villains (who were by then trying to shoot them with worse things than darts), Nathan tried to convince Charlie, who is claustrophobic, to enter a small gap and Charlie attacked him. After a brief scuffle that mostly involved Charlie swinging punches every which way while Nathan ran around saying nice things to him, Charlie managed to get ahold of Nathan and started strangling him. Sully, mentor and father figure to Nathan, tried to shoot Charlie but Chloe jumped between them and managed to snap Charlie out of his daze. Later the rest of the group was separated from Charlie and had to watch as Marlowe, their main antagonist, lit a fire behind him and forced him to choose between burning to death or jumping off a tower (also, presumably, to his death). Charlie chose to jump and survived but broke his leg. Despite his attempts to get them to leave him behind, the group escaped together and stole a tour bus to escape the ruins. Chloe was clearly shaken by these events and told Nathan that she was dropping the job because the risk outweighed the reward. She tried to convince him to drop it as well but he refused. (The “treasure” turned out to be the hallucinogenic water so she was probably right on this one)

Six years later, Chloe decided to try and finish what her father had started and locate the Tusk of Ganesh herself. She invited Nathan along but he had left the criminal world upon marrying Elena so he turned her down, but recommended his brother Sam for the job.

She sent Sam ahead to do some recon and he was immediately kidnapped by her rival Asav as an “expert” that he would use to locate the Tusk himself. Sam managed to get a message back to Chloe asking her to get help, so she contracted Nadine Ross, a former associate of Asav’s, to help her track him down. Unfortunately for Chloe, Sam had also attempted to murder Nadine not that long ago (the only reason that she had survived was that Nathan had pushed the gun upward as Sam fired), and she blamed the Drake brothers for the loss of Shoreline, the paramilitary company that she had inherited from her father. Chloe dealt with this in exactly the sort of way that Chloe deals with all difficult things: she contracted Nadine to help her locate the Tusk and did not mention Sam’s involvement at all.

Their relationship was initially antagonistic as Nadine’s strict military discipline didn’t mesh well with Chloe’s wild improvisation, and after the events of A Thief’s End, Nadine was understandably reluctant to trust a treasure hunter. However, the two grew closer as they searched for clues in the Western Ghats and eventually formed a strong friendship. Nadine was furious when she found out about Sam, assuming (likely correctly) that Chloe’s intention had been to use her connections to locate Sam and then cut her out of the deal once she found him. She punched Chloe in the face, and while she was down she stole their vehicle and took off on her own. However, Nadine’s lack of experience in jungle driving meant that she didn’t really get far, and Chloe was able to reunite with her and reconcile through a roundabout apology.

The two were able to rescue Sam and retrieve the Tusk, however Asav stole the treasure from them and escaped after handcuffing them to a railing and triggering an explosion that caused the room to slowly fill with water, leaving them to drown. Chloe was able to pick the locks on the cuffs and they escaped.

By the time they were free, Asav had traded the Tusk to what remained of Shoreline, being run by Orca, Nadine’s former second in command, and escaped with his real prize via train. They stole the Tusk back, killing Orca in the process, but discovered that the real prize was a bomb. Asav was planning to detonate the bomb in the nearby city when the train passed through it, which would trigger a civil war in the area. Chloe convinced Sam and Nadine to help her stop the bomb despite all involved believing it to be a suicide mission. Chloe and Nadine boarded the train but were unable to stop the engine or deactivate the bomb. Chloe briefly un-boarded to switch the train to a different track so it wouldn’t drive through the city at all and then re-boarded to rescue Nadine. The two defeated Asav in hand-to-hand combat and then escaped the train just as it drove over a broken bridge and was destroyed.

In the aftermath of the train’s destruction, Chloe and Nadine decided to deliver the Tusk to the Indian Ministry of Culture (much to Sam’s consternation) and to set up a more permanent professional treasure hunting partnership together.

Alternate memories: Chloe was born in India, but her family fled to Australia at the turn of the century as political tensions began to worsen. Her family struggled to adapt to their new life and she grew up in poverty, particularly after her father's death when she was 10. For a long time, it seemed as if she was doomed to a lifetime of drudgery in a textile factory, but the outbreak of war in 1914 offered her a chance to change her fortune. With only a small blurring of truth on the paperwork (including the name Chloe Frazer), she volunteered with the Red Cross as a nurse and left Australia behind.

She served initially in Egypt, and then later in other parts Africa and Asia in Casualty Clearing Stations (field hospitals). The newfound respect that came with her work and the ability to actually do something that mattered were exhilarating, but Chloe struggled both with the severity of the injuries that she encountered and the realities of triage. Having power over who lives and dies in that way is something that she continues to struggle with after the war has ended.

After the war, not wanting to return to Australia, Chloe made her way to America to seek her fortune in Columbia City. She learned quickly that entrance to more elite social circles was based more on appearance than reality and used her military stipend to take elocution lessons to refine her accent and to acquire property in a pricey neighbourhood (only the front rooms that guests might see are furnished, but no one needs to know about that).

Rubbing elbows with the right people led her to a three-year venture with a trust fund type named Nathaniel to find the Cintamani Stone. This version of that adventure had notably fewer immortal men in yeti costumes than the real one, but they still only found a large ball of explosive amber and returned empty-handed with a fractured relationship. Fortunately, from the ashes of that venture, she was able to salvage a set of lucrative speaking engagements targeted at a public who were still obsessed with exploration and adventure survival stories like polar expeditions. This kept her relatively comfortable economically through the rest of the '20s, and eventually let her talk herself on to a National Geographic-funded expedition to Egypt to excavate a tomb - this is where she thinks she is returning from as the game begins.

Chloe wasn't as severely affected as many others by the stock market crash since a lot of her wealth was already a veneer, but she's struggled with not being able to trick people into buying things for her as easily.

Plans for your character: As of right now the character's main goal is to renew relationships that she has in the city (since she's been away for a while) and to build new ones with people who might be able to help her out, with an end goal of finding a patron who will support her in a second Egypt expedition. Shorter-term goals include partying as much as possible and not getting murdered. She's also invested in keeping her pre-war identity secret, which might be harder once the murder investigators start sniffing around.

As a player, a big part of the appeal of a character like this is Causing Problems On Purpose (I find there's always a lot of good and surprising CR opportunities for a character who makes impulsive snap decisions), but she's also got some more serious stuff to work on in terms of her survivor's guilt from the war and the distance she puts between herself and even the people she thinks she's close to.

Inventory: Chloe doesn't usually carry a lot of things on her because she's out in rich girl cosplay, but if she can have something that she owns in real life she has a tiny bronze statue of the Hindu god Ganesh (it fits in her jeans pocket) that was a gift from her father.

SAMPLES
Sample 1: TDM thread (Yelena)

Sample 2: TDM thread (Spike)

Style Credit