Carmen Sandiego (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
doitrockapella) wrote2017-06-25 10:09 am
doitrockapella) wrote2017-06-25 10:09 am
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recolle
PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Alex
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT: PM this journal!
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Kurama (roseblooms)
RESERVATION LINK: HERE!
YOUR NAME: Alex
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT: PM this journal!
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Kurama (
roseblooms)RESERVATION LINK: HERE!
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Carmen Sandiego
AGE: 29, just shy of 30, at last canon appearance
CANON: Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
NAME: Carmen Sandiego
AGE: 29, just shy of 30, at last canon appearance
CANON: Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
CANON HISTORY:
▶ Carmen Sandiego at Wikipedia.
▶ Carmen Sandiego on the Carmen Sandiego Wiki.
▶ Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - an episode guide with summaries of all the ridiculous stuff that Carmen steals and why.
▶ A history and personality overview as pertaining to the Where on Earth series in particular.
▶ TVTropes pertaining to the Where on Earth series; it's a pretty trope-y show.
Essentially, while there is a given amount of in-series continuity to the canon, most episodes are stand-alones that follow the traditional Carmen Sandiego formula: Carmen's bored and has a crime on her mind, so she steals thematically-related objects from all different parts of the world as a part of a greater scheme; Zack and Ivy, with the help of the Chief, the Player, and other ACME agents, track Carmen down, stop her crime, and cover lots of fun and interesting educational tidbits along the way.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Carmen Sandiego: A philosopher once said, "Competition can make you stronger."
Player: Which philosopher said that?
Carmen Sandiego: Me!
Carmen Sandiego is many things: brilliant, cunning, charismatic, and phenomenally bored. Once the brightest and most successful ACME operative the agency had ever known, she is now the world's most renowned thief, putting her remarkable skills to use on the opposite side of the law. However, this turn to the dark side (though she would probably be more likely to call it a job transfer into a different department) had nothing to do with any sort of betrayal, upset, or otherwise stereotypically cataclysmic interpersonal clash; she simply got bored of solving crimes when it no longer presented any challenge for her, and so she decided to try her hand at committing them, instead.
Carmen's morality, therefore, is an interesting conundrum. She presumably isn't concerned with the general, nameless people who may be hurt by her crimes (for example, she steals an opera singer's voice without missing a beat, and frequently takes buildings with little to no regard for the people who theoretically might be inside), but she has a unique sense of loyalty to the handful of people who do manage to warrant her attention and respect. She acknowledges Zack and Ivy as worthy rivals, even to the point of considering them the only two people capable of being her potential successors, and despite leaving ACME for a life of crime, she still shows a reasonable amount of attachment to the Chief and her former partner and mentor, Suhara. She goes out of her way to challenge Zack and Ivy, and will never miss a chance to taunt them, but at the same time she cares deeply about their well-being and will abandon her plans in an instant if it looks as though they are in serious danger with no means of escaping it on their own. She also dislikes violence and shows disdain for criminals who resort to it, preferring intellectual cunning over brute force as a means of solving problems. While she isn't the sort to maintain friendships, precisely, there are still people she likes and feels invested in, and even cares about in her odd Carmen way.
In fact, over the course of the show, Carmen's odd morality becomes something of a central fixture in the way she shifts from an outright antagonist to something more along the lines of an antihero. She ends up contrasted with four other antagonists throughout the series, all of whom prove to be more overtly villainous than her in their own ways, and against whom she tends to team up with Zack and Ivy for the sake of bringing those "worse criminals than her" to justice. These antagonists include Sarah Bellum, Carmen's former second-in-command, who has far more tolerance for wanton destruction in her crimes than Carmen has ever allowed; Mason Dixon, whose inferiority complex ends up leading him to change history to make himself dominant over Carmen instead of the other way around; Gunnar Maelstrom, who was Carmen's own archrival back when she was a detective and who is willing to resort to violence as a means of succeeding at his crimes where Carmen is not; and Lee Jordan, who acts as Carmen's foil in that he follows the same path of reaching the top of his detective career before turning to crime as a new pursuit, but who refuses to adhere to Carmen's personal moral principles when it comes to committing crimes, and ends up having a falling out with her because of it.
Frequently, these antagonists criticize Carmen for her "lofty moral superiority", pointing out that she is in fact no better than them when ultimately they are all thieves. Maelstrom in particular is unusually effective at this, as the show demonstrates that he was the one who originally Hannibal Lectured her into landing on the path that would ultimately lead her to becoming a thief herself. In a classic "we're not so different, you and I" speech, Maelstrom accuses Carmen (then a top ACME detective) of being "a thief at heart", and that by attempting to put him behind bars, it's simply "his freedom" that she's seeking to "steal". This notion is later echoed by her former partner, Suhara, who comments that Carmen is "drawn to the danger like a moth to a flame", and that she essentially "lives for the game" of being the world's greatest thief — because it's the excitement and the challenge that she craves, not the aspect of taking what others have. Her motivations for what she steals can vary — they're sometimes altruistic, sometimes self-centered, and sometimes just downright quirky — but the act of stealing itself is always founded at least partly on the thrill of the chase.
And indeed, Carmen does distinguish herself from those rivals in precisely those ways. While not outright averse to physical violence, she does consider people who resort to it to be inferior, and much prefers a "brains over brawn" mentality when it comes to her crimes. She's also willing to assist the protagonists on a moment's notice when it looks as though they're at risk of being legitimately harmed in the course of a chase — including throwing them life preservers when they end up dunked in the ocean while she gets away by boat or plane, or by outright running to try to grab them and pull them up if it looks like they're going to fall off of something airborne while they hang on for dear life. It's clear from her conduct that while she is a thief, she seeks to be a different type of thief than the ones that she herself pursued as an ACME detective; it's also apparent that, as the head of the VILE criminal syndicate, she has the ability to enforce those lofty moral principles onto the conduct of her henchmen, and indeed will outright refuse to hire on underlings if she considers them unable or unwilling to play by her rules.
It goes without saying, of course, that as a person Carmen is incredibly smart, a wealth of ridiculous trivia, and prone to quoting philosophers and other literary sources of which she happens to be fond (as the quote that began this section would suggest). It's not uncommon for her to share bits of trivia related to the things she's doing (this is, after all, an educational show), and her crimes tend to follow predictable patterns and themes related to those interests. She has a quick wit and a clever sense of humor, and she's clearly got both whimsy and creativity in spades, considering some of the ideas she comes up with — playing life-size chess with stolen monuments, painting her profile on the moon, resurrecting a dinosaur just to see if she can, and so on. Really, she's something of a gigantic tease, and typically adopts a sort of flirty, catch-me-if-you-can sort of demeanor with the people she interacts with — again, a habit born of simply loving the game she's playing, and never really wanting to see it as anything but a game to begin with.
Unfortunately, this also means that sometimes, Carmen is competitive to a fault. She definitely does not back down from a challenge — even when that challenge is stupid or a sort of really obvious trap, she'll go for it simply because someone apparently thinks she can't, and she's going to prove them wrong. She's not above committing thefts on what basically amounts to a dare, and she'll walk into traps knowing they're traps just for the sake of not backing down. Granted, that doesn't mean she's not walking in with a contingency plan that's either going to neutralize the threat or let her get away scot-free at the end (or both), but she's pretty susceptible to provocation, and especially so when it's someone calling her thieving skills into question. She's prideful; Carmen is the best thief in the world and she not only knows it, but she expects everyone else to recognize it, too. Suggest that she isn't and she'll cheerfully prove you otherwise. Seek to surpass her and she'll happily knock you down a few pegs, and then point out that she's much more interested in seeing people excel at what they're good at, rather than trying to be better than her at what she's good at instead.
However, Carmen does have a softer, more human side beneath the devious Cheshire Cat persona that has become her trademark. She has a soft spot for children, particularly orphans, because she was one herself, and even steals her former home, the Golden Gate Girls' School in San Francisco, when it is about to be torn down. That same fondness is also reflected in the fact that she themes the orphanage caper around The Wizard of Oz — her favorite book as a child — because, of course, "there's no place like home". (In a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, Zack and Ivy decide to let her get away with taking it, since it was going to be knocked down anyway, and it was the only home she'd ever known — to which the Chief protests rather touchingly that ACME was her home, too.) She is also very fond of animals, particularly cats, and at one point steals a pair of white lions with the intent of housing them on a personal game preserve of hers (with diamond necklaces for collars, totem poles as scratching posts, and an entire black-sand beach in Hawaii for a litter box, no less).
All in all, who is Carmen Sandiego? Well, perhaps Rockapella said it best: "She's a double-dealing diva with a taste for thievery"—and no one puts the "miss" in "misdemeanor" like she does.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ohhh, boy. Well, okay, let's start with the obvious one: Carmen Sandiego is the greatest thief in the world.
Where this gets complicated is the fact that there really doesn't appear to be any particular upper limit on what she's capable of stealing; in the first episode alone we're given a breaking news bulletin that Carmen has stolen all of the TV signals in the world at once, and the only explanation offered is verbatim, "Yeah, I don't know how she did it, either." Given that the show is an edutainment canon, the "how" is sort of treated as being utterly beside the point, but it's not that Carmen is inherently magical or blessed with some sort of unique quality that allows her to do this; it's frankly just that she's Really Damn Good™ at being a thief.
(As an aside, I know this complicates things a great deal in an RP sense because there's really no logical explanation for how she does this, but at the same time, nerfing her down to normal human levels of theft sort of defeats the purpose of playing her as Carmen Sandiego, so I hope we can work together to find a workable compromise that preserves the spirit of the character while still avoiding the pitfalls of potentially breaking the game.)
While understandably I'm not going to deluge you with an exhaustive list of everything she steals in the series, some of her more outlandish thefts include:
❖ the aforementioned theft of all the TV signals on earth simultaneously
❖ Stonehenge
❖ The Sydney Opera House
❖ Mont St. Michel
❖ a space shuttle
❖ a person's talent (including an opera singer's voice and a violinist's skill)
❖ ACME's Chronoskimmer, which is essentially a time machine
❖ The Colosseum, via time machine/time travel
❖ BUT NOT a Lite Brite from FAO Schwarz because she actually paid for that, go figure.
...If that gives you some context and kind of the outer boundaries of the sorts of things she's shown to be capable of.
Her other noteworthy skills are all directly related to her status of being a great thief; she's exceptionally athletic and strong, clearly possesses a good understanding of physics, and has an vast array of Trivial Pursuit factoids at her disposal — her extensive knowledge of history and geography is a foregone conclusion, but she's also pretty expert in areas like deductive reasoning, literature, and other assorted academic pursuits. She can drive pretty much any vehicle competently, whether it operates on the ground, on the sea, or in the air — including knowing how to ride a horse like a Wild West desperado. She's a computer whiz and a skilled hacker, even managing to break into ACME's own protected mainframe a few times over the course of the series. She's a master of disguise and a talented actress, to the point where she can make herself virtually unrecognizable as her usual self. She has an affinity for animals and can apparently tame a guard dog with a soft shush and a pat on the head, which is either the result of alpha confidence, being a dog whisperer, or some combination of both. Like Zack, she speaks at least thirty languages*; like Suhara, she's a trained Zen master; like Ivy, she's a martial artist with a background in a couple of different disciplines.
* For the purposes of her Recollé AU, I'd like her to speak a total of four, thus making her an accomplished polyglot without rendering her MIND-BLOWINGLY INSANE when it comes to her linguistic skills: English, Spanish (from her parents), Japanese (from her legal guardian), and Russian (one of the ones she's shown speaking onscreen in the series).
Essentially, while none of Carmen's skills are inherently magical or fantastic in nature, she is kind of the definition of Badass Normal, and if a skill goes in any way toward the practice of being a thief, she probably possesses it in spades.
If you feel this section needs more specific fleshing-out, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll try my best to be more extensive with the particulars, but essentially her skillset is driven by plot/narrative considerations in canon (in the sense of, if it would be helpful toward stealing something, she can probably already do it), so it can be a little hard to pin down in exacting terms.
▶ Carmen Sandiego at Wikipedia.
▶ Carmen Sandiego on the Carmen Sandiego Wiki.
▶ Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - an episode guide with summaries of all the ridiculous stuff that Carmen steals and why.
▶ A history and personality overview as pertaining to the Where on Earth series in particular.
▶ TVTropes pertaining to the Where on Earth series; it's a pretty trope-y show.
Essentially, while there is a given amount of in-series continuity to the canon, most episodes are stand-alones that follow the traditional Carmen Sandiego formula: Carmen's bored and has a crime on her mind, so she steals thematically-related objects from all different parts of the world as a part of a greater scheme; Zack and Ivy, with the help of the Chief, the Player, and other ACME agents, track Carmen down, stop her crime, and cover lots of fun and interesting educational tidbits along the way.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Player: Which philosopher said that?
Carmen Sandiego: Me!
Carmen Sandiego is many things: brilliant, cunning, charismatic, and phenomenally bored. Once the brightest and most successful ACME operative the agency had ever known, she is now the world's most renowned thief, putting her remarkable skills to use on the opposite side of the law. However, this turn to the dark side (though she would probably be more likely to call it a job transfer into a different department) had nothing to do with any sort of betrayal, upset, or otherwise stereotypically cataclysmic interpersonal clash; she simply got bored of solving crimes when it no longer presented any challenge for her, and so she decided to try her hand at committing them, instead.
Carmen's morality, therefore, is an interesting conundrum. She presumably isn't concerned with the general, nameless people who may be hurt by her crimes (for example, she steals an opera singer's voice without missing a beat, and frequently takes buildings with little to no regard for the people who theoretically might be inside), but she has a unique sense of loyalty to the handful of people who do manage to warrant her attention and respect. She acknowledges Zack and Ivy as worthy rivals, even to the point of considering them the only two people capable of being her potential successors, and despite leaving ACME for a life of crime, she still shows a reasonable amount of attachment to the Chief and her former partner and mentor, Suhara. She goes out of her way to challenge Zack and Ivy, and will never miss a chance to taunt them, but at the same time she cares deeply about their well-being and will abandon her plans in an instant if it looks as though they are in serious danger with no means of escaping it on their own. She also dislikes violence and shows disdain for criminals who resort to it, preferring intellectual cunning over brute force as a means of solving problems. While she isn't the sort to maintain friendships, precisely, there are still people she likes and feels invested in, and even cares about in her odd Carmen way.
In fact, over the course of the show, Carmen's odd morality becomes something of a central fixture in the way she shifts from an outright antagonist to something more along the lines of an antihero. She ends up contrasted with four other antagonists throughout the series, all of whom prove to be more overtly villainous than her in their own ways, and against whom she tends to team up with Zack and Ivy for the sake of bringing those "worse criminals than her" to justice. These antagonists include Sarah Bellum, Carmen's former second-in-command, who has far more tolerance for wanton destruction in her crimes than Carmen has ever allowed; Mason Dixon, whose inferiority complex ends up leading him to change history to make himself dominant over Carmen instead of the other way around; Gunnar Maelstrom, who was Carmen's own archrival back when she was a detective and who is willing to resort to violence as a means of succeeding at his crimes where Carmen is not; and Lee Jordan, who acts as Carmen's foil in that he follows the same path of reaching the top of his detective career before turning to crime as a new pursuit, but who refuses to adhere to Carmen's personal moral principles when it comes to committing crimes, and ends up having a falling out with her because of it.
Frequently, these antagonists criticize Carmen for her "lofty moral superiority", pointing out that she is in fact no better than them when ultimately they are all thieves. Maelstrom in particular is unusually effective at this, as the show demonstrates that he was the one who originally Hannibal Lectured her into landing on the path that would ultimately lead her to becoming a thief herself. In a classic "we're not so different, you and I" speech, Maelstrom accuses Carmen (then a top ACME detective) of being "a thief at heart", and that by attempting to put him behind bars, it's simply "his freedom" that she's seeking to "steal". This notion is later echoed by her former partner, Suhara, who comments that Carmen is "drawn to the danger like a moth to a flame", and that she essentially "lives for the game" of being the world's greatest thief — because it's the excitement and the challenge that she craves, not the aspect of taking what others have. Her motivations for what she steals can vary — they're sometimes altruistic, sometimes self-centered, and sometimes just downright quirky — but the act of stealing itself is always founded at least partly on the thrill of the chase.
And indeed, Carmen does distinguish herself from those rivals in precisely those ways. While not outright averse to physical violence, she does consider people who resort to it to be inferior, and much prefers a "brains over brawn" mentality when it comes to her crimes. She's also willing to assist the protagonists on a moment's notice when it looks as though they're at risk of being legitimately harmed in the course of a chase — including throwing them life preservers when they end up dunked in the ocean while she gets away by boat or plane, or by outright running to try to grab them and pull them up if it looks like they're going to fall off of something airborne while they hang on for dear life. It's clear from her conduct that while she is a thief, she seeks to be a different type of thief than the ones that she herself pursued as an ACME detective; it's also apparent that, as the head of the VILE criminal syndicate, she has the ability to enforce those lofty moral principles onto the conduct of her henchmen, and indeed will outright refuse to hire on underlings if she considers them unable or unwilling to play by her rules.
It goes without saying, of course, that as a person Carmen is incredibly smart, a wealth of ridiculous trivia, and prone to quoting philosophers and other literary sources of which she happens to be fond (as the quote that began this section would suggest). It's not uncommon for her to share bits of trivia related to the things she's doing (this is, after all, an educational show), and her crimes tend to follow predictable patterns and themes related to those interests. She has a quick wit and a clever sense of humor, and she's clearly got both whimsy and creativity in spades, considering some of the ideas she comes up with — playing life-size chess with stolen monuments, painting her profile on the moon, resurrecting a dinosaur just to see if she can, and so on. Really, she's something of a gigantic tease, and typically adopts a sort of flirty, catch-me-if-you-can sort of demeanor with the people she interacts with — again, a habit born of simply loving the game she's playing, and never really wanting to see it as anything but a game to begin with.
Unfortunately, this also means that sometimes, Carmen is competitive to a fault. She definitely does not back down from a challenge — even when that challenge is stupid or a sort of really obvious trap, she'll go for it simply because someone apparently thinks she can't, and she's going to prove them wrong. She's not above committing thefts on what basically amounts to a dare, and she'll walk into traps knowing they're traps just for the sake of not backing down. Granted, that doesn't mean she's not walking in with a contingency plan that's either going to neutralize the threat or let her get away scot-free at the end (or both), but she's pretty susceptible to provocation, and especially so when it's someone calling her thieving skills into question. She's prideful; Carmen is the best thief in the world and she not only knows it, but she expects everyone else to recognize it, too. Suggest that she isn't and she'll cheerfully prove you otherwise. Seek to surpass her and she'll happily knock you down a few pegs, and then point out that she's much more interested in seeing people excel at what they're good at, rather than trying to be better than her at what she's good at instead.
However, Carmen does have a softer, more human side beneath the devious Cheshire Cat persona that has become her trademark. She has a soft spot for children, particularly orphans, because she was one herself, and even steals her former home, the Golden Gate Girls' School in San Francisco, when it is about to be torn down. That same fondness is also reflected in the fact that she themes the orphanage caper around The Wizard of Oz — her favorite book as a child — because, of course, "there's no place like home". (In a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, Zack and Ivy decide to let her get away with taking it, since it was going to be knocked down anyway, and it was the only home she'd ever known — to which the Chief protests rather touchingly that ACME was her home, too.) She is also very fond of animals, particularly cats, and at one point steals a pair of white lions with the intent of housing them on a personal game preserve of hers (with diamond necklaces for collars, totem poles as scratching posts, and an entire black-sand beach in Hawaii for a litter box, no less).
All in all, who is Carmen Sandiego? Well, perhaps Rockapella said it best: "She's a double-dealing diva with a taste for thievery"—and no one puts the "miss" in "misdemeanor" like she does.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ohhh, boy. Well, okay, let's start with the obvious one: Carmen Sandiego is the greatest thief in the world.
Where this gets complicated is the fact that there really doesn't appear to be any particular upper limit on what she's capable of stealing; in the first episode alone we're given a breaking news bulletin that Carmen has stolen all of the TV signals in the world at once, and the only explanation offered is verbatim, "Yeah, I don't know how she did it, either." Given that the show is an edutainment canon, the "how" is sort of treated as being utterly beside the point, but it's not that Carmen is inherently magical or blessed with some sort of unique quality that allows her to do this; it's frankly just that she's Really Damn Good™ at being a thief.
(As an aside, I know this complicates things a great deal in an RP sense because there's really no logical explanation for how she does this, but at the same time, nerfing her down to normal human levels of theft sort of defeats the purpose of playing her as Carmen Sandiego, so I hope we can work together to find a workable compromise that preserves the spirit of the character while still avoiding the pitfalls of potentially breaking the game.)
While understandably I'm not going to deluge you with an exhaustive list of everything she steals in the series, some of her more outlandish thefts include:
❖ Stonehenge
❖ The Sydney Opera House
❖ Mont St. Michel
❖ a space shuttle
❖ a person's talent (including an opera singer's voice and a violinist's skill)
❖ ACME's Chronoskimmer, which is essentially a time machine
❖ The Colosseum, via time machine/time travel
❖ BUT NOT a Lite Brite from FAO Schwarz because she actually paid for that, go figure.
...If that gives you some context and kind of the outer boundaries of the sorts of things she's shown to be capable of.
Her other noteworthy skills are all directly related to her status of being a great thief; she's exceptionally athletic and strong, clearly possesses a good understanding of physics, and has an vast array of Trivial Pursuit factoids at her disposal — her extensive knowledge of history and geography is a foregone conclusion, but she's also pretty expert in areas like deductive reasoning, literature, and other assorted academic pursuits. She can drive pretty much any vehicle competently, whether it operates on the ground, on the sea, or in the air — including knowing how to ride a horse like a Wild West desperado. She's a computer whiz and a skilled hacker, even managing to break into ACME's own protected mainframe a few times over the course of the series. She's a master of disguise and a talented actress, to the point where she can make herself virtually unrecognizable as her usual self. She has an affinity for animals and can apparently tame a guard dog with a soft shush and a pat on the head, which is either the result of alpha confidence, being a dog whisperer, or some combination of both. Like Zack, she speaks at least thirty languages*; like Suhara, she's a trained Zen master; like Ivy, she's a martial artist with a background in a couple of different disciplines.
* For the purposes of her Recollé AU, I'd like her to speak a total of four, thus making her an accomplished polyglot without rendering her MIND-BLOWINGLY INSANE when it comes to her linguistic skills: English, Spanish (from her parents), Japanese (from her legal guardian), and Russian (one of the ones she's shown speaking onscreen in the series).
Essentially, while none of Carmen's skills are inherently magical or fantastic in nature, she is kind of the definition of Badass Normal, and if a skill goes in any way toward the practice of being a thief, she probably possesses it in spades.
If you feel this section needs more specific fleshing-out, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll try my best to be more extensive with the particulars, but essentially her skillset is driven by plot/narrative considerations in canon (in the sense of, if it would be helpful toward stealing something, she can probably already do it), so it can be a little hard to pin down in exacting terms.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Carmen Sandiego
AU AGE: Still 30-ish!
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: None, save for the fact that in this AU history, she's been injured fairly recently (which is why she's willing to stay in Recollé instead of trying to travel the world; she's on a medical leave of absence from work) and as such is recuperating from that.
AU NAME: Carmen Sandiego
AU AGE: Still 30-ish!
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: None, save for the fact that in this AU history, she's been injured fairly recently (which is why she's willing to stay in Recollé instead of trying to travel the world; she's on a medical leave of absence from work) and as such is recuperating from that.
AU HISTORY:
❖ Born the daughter of a wealthy international art dealer (her father) and an insurance claims investigator (her mother), which means that essentially her parents were Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux with their respective occupations flipped.
❖ Grew up generally (read: disgustingly) well-to-do, but to a set of parents who were very much hardworking, travel-oriented, career-oriented people in their own right, and who as such always went above and beyond to instill in her an appreciation for hard work and personal independence. Though she never lacked for money, she certainly wasn't spoiled; on the contrary she's mostly just inclined to see wealth as means to an end, because having money lets you do things, and she very much likes to do things.
❖ Both of her parents were self-starters of a sort; her father is in business for himself as an art dealer, and after working as a claims investigator for insurance companies for a number of years, her mother struck out on her own to form Veil Retrieval Specialists, Incorporated — a business designed to train future claims investigators and use her existing connections to help them positions at insurance companies. So, sort of a feeder school for being a secret agent.
❖ Comes with a supporting set of background characters in the form of family friends and acquaintances who held high-level positions in her mother's corporation, all of whom she tended to call by nicknames and pet names instead of by real ones — e.g. "The Chief", who is the Chief Executive Officer of the company; "The Inspector" (short for "Inspector Gadget"), who oversees the IT and gadgetry aspects of the business; and so on.
❖ Orphaned at age fifteen when, while on a vacation with her parents, their living arrangements caught fire and the roof collapsed. Carmen was able to escape the blaze, in what people around her later called a miracle and a Houdini act, but her parents tragically were not.
❖ Unsurprisingly, she developed pretty severe claustrophobia in the aftermath of that incident, and as such much prefers wide open spaces with no roof over her head to the alternative of being closed in somewhere.
❖ Spent the rest of her youth and a handful of years after being raised by The Chief, The Inspector, and a close friend of her parents who took on the responsibility of becoming her legal guardian. As per her parents' wishes, their assets poured over into a trust for which Carmen is the sole beneficiary, and The Chief also became executor of the trust and continued to manage her parents' estate while Carmen pursued her studies.
❖ Eventually applied for and was accepted to her mother's own training program at Veil, where she proved to be a top student even without the benefits of nepotism. That then helped her to find a job of her own in her mother's old career, where she worked several years as an insurance claims investigator and ultimately developed a reputation as an expert at recovering stolen items — even better than her mother had been, in her time.
❖ Was recently badly injured on a case, leading to a medical leave of absence and her move to Recollé to recuperate, at her former guardian's urging.
❖ Suffered from cabin fever for a while before eventually deciding to stop looking at her leave of absence as a burden and opting to instead treat the time off as an opportunity.
❖ Has fairly recently formed the Sandiego Foundation in Recollé, using a decent chunk of her personal resources and a lot of her existing networking connections to form a nonprofit organization focused around supporting the arts and assisting children in advancing their own education, much the way people had always helped her further hers.
❖ Continues to recuperate from her injuries (which she hides) while she runs charity events and fundraisers and tries to pretend that she doesn't actually miss the thrills of her old job a whole lot.
❖ She is never seen not wearing red in some capacity. This has nothing to do with her history, though people are welcome to speculate that it does as much as they want.
AU PERSONALITY:
Honestly, Carmen is pretty much the same in Recollé as she is in canon, personality-wise — or at least, she's effectively the person she always could have been, if environmental factors had gone a little bit differently for her. In canon, Carmen becomes the world's greatest thief not because she actually wants to possess any of the things she's stealing, but because she loves the thrill of the chase and likes testing her skills to see how far she can push the limits of her own abilities. In Recollé, she's still just as ambitious and driven as ever; she still hates idleness and still looks around for intellectual challenges with which to simulate herself.
If anything, the major difference between Carmen in Recollé and Carmen in canon is that in in her Recollé AU, she had the benefits of an immediate family for far longer, and so her tendency to be independent never quite went to the extremes that it did in canon. Canonically, Carmen's inclination toward independence is frankly as much of a flaw as it is an asset; she actually fails to perceive that other people might actually care about her even when she's not explicitly trying to make them care, and she doesn't always seem to realize that her own actions can sometimes affect and even hurt the people who care about her. Here in Recollé, she's got a much better grasp of that concept and also a much stronger support network, such that while she's still very independent and stubborn, she's generally less of a quasi-sociopath about it.
(She's also somewhat less inclined to jump off of buildings, at least at this point, and her wanderlust has been egregiously toned down for the sake of keeping her in the damn game at all because good grief do you know how hard it is to pin Carmen Sandiego down in one city for any given length of time. IT IS NOT EASY.)
❖ Born the daughter of a wealthy international art dealer (her father) and an insurance claims investigator (her mother), which means that essentially her parents were Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux with their respective occupations flipped.
❖ Grew up generally (read: disgustingly) well-to-do, but to a set of parents who were very much hardworking, travel-oriented, career-oriented people in their own right, and who as such always went above and beyond to instill in her an appreciation for hard work and personal independence. Though she never lacked for money, she certainly wasn't spoiled; on the contrary she's mostly just inclined to see wealth as means to an end, because having money lets you do things, and she very much likes to do things.
❖ Both of her parents were self-starters of a sort; her father is in business for himself as an art dealer, and after working as a claims investigator for insurance companies for a number of years, her mother struck out on her own to form Veil Retrieval Specialists, Incorporated — a business designed to train future claims investigators and use her existing connections to help them positions at insurance companies. So, sort of a feeder school for being a secret agent.
❖ Comes with a supporting set of background characters in the form of family friends and acquaintances who held high-level positions in her mother's corporation, all of whom she tended to call by nicknames and pet names instead of by real ones — e.g. "The Chief", who is the Chief Executive Officer of the company; "The Inspector" (short for "Inspector Gadget"), who oversees the IT and gadgetry aspects of the business; and so on.
❖ Orphaned at age fifteen when, while on a vacation with her parents, their living arrangements caught fire and the roof collapsed. Carmen was able to escape the blaze, in what people around her later called a miracle and a Houdini act, but her parents tragically were not.
❖ Unsurprisingly, she developed pretty severe claustrophobia in the aftermath of that incident, and as such much prefers wide open spaces with no roof over her head to the alternative of being closed in somewhere.
❖ Spent the rest of her youth and a handful of years after being raised by The Chief, The Inspector, and a close friend of her parents who took on the responsibility of becoming her legal guardian. As per her parents' wishes, their assets poured over into a trust for which Carmen is the sole beneficiary, and The Chief also became executor of the trust and continued to manage her parents' estate while Carmen pursued her studies.
❖ Eventually applied for and was accepted to her mother's own training program at Veil, where she proved to be a top student even without the benefits of nepotism. That then helped her to find a job of her own in her mother's old career, where she worked several years as an insurance claims investigator and ultimately developed a reputation as an expert at recovering stolen items — even better than her mother had been, in her time.
❖ Was recently badly injured on a case, leading to a medical leave of absence and her move to Recollé to recuperate, at her former guardian's urging.
❖ Suffered from cabin fever for a while before eventually deciding to stop looking at her leave of absence as a burden and opting to instead treat the time off as an opportunity.
❖ Has fairly recently formed the Sandiego Foundation in Recollé, using a decent chunk of her personal resources and a lot of her existing networking connections to form a nonprofit organization focused around supporting the arts and assisting children in advancing their own education, much the way people had always helped her further hers.
❖ Continues to recuperate from her injuries (which she hides) while she runs charity events and fundraisers and tries to pretend that she doesn't actually miss the thrills of her old job a whole lot.
❖ She is never seen not wearing red in some capacity. This has nothing to do with her history, though people are welcome to speculate that it does as much as they want.
AU PERSONALITY:
Honestly, Carmen is pretty much the same in Recollé as she is in canon, personality-wise — or at least, she's effectively the person she always could have been, if environmental factors had gone a little bit differently for her. In canon, Carmen becomes the world's greatest thief not because she actually wants to possess any of the things she's stealing, but because she loves the thrill of the chase and likes testing her skills to see how far she can push the limits of her own abilities. In Recollé, she's still just as ambitious and driven as ever; she still hates idleness and still looks around for intellectual challenges with which to simulate herself.
If anything, the major difference between Carmen in Recollé and Carmen in canon is that in in her Recollé AU, she had the benefits of an immediate family for far longer, and so her tendency to be independent never quite went to the extremes that it did in canon. Canonically, Carmen's inclination toward independence is frankly as much of a flaw as it is an asset; she actually fails to perceive that other people might actually care about her even when she's not explicitly trying to make them care, and she doesn't always seem to realize that her own actions can sometimes affect and even hurt the people who care about her. Here in Recollé, she's got a much better grasp of that concept and also a much stronger support network, such that while she's still very independent and stubborn, she's generally less of a quasi-sociopath about it.
(She's also somewhat less inclined to jump off of buildings, at least at this point, and her wanderlust has been egregiously toned down for the sake of keeping her in the damn game at all because good grief do you know how hard it is to pin Carmen Sandiego down in one city for any given length of time. IT IS NOT EASY.)