[APPLICATION - CONSIGNMENT]

[boostpower]

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: Whit
✖ Contact: whitticus or on AIM @ bestmysterious
✖ Are You Over 16: Y
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: N/A

CHARACTER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Captain Falcon
✖ Canon: F-Zero (Gameverse, post-F-Zero GX Chapter 6)
✖ Character Appearance:
A cool guy, the kind of cool guy who puts his own initials on his belt buckle. Tall, imposing, and built. There's exactly one (tiny, terrible, kind of wonk) image of his actual face, but it is generally agreed upon that he has brown hair and sports a large scar that cuts through his left eyebrow, presumably from smacking his head in a car wreck. I put all of that information into my magic artist interpretation synthesizer and came up with this.
✖ Character Age: 37
✖ Pick A Number: 7, 111

A small aside regarding Super Smash Brothers:
It is unfortunate to note that Falcon's most recent and arguably most well-known appearances are in games that are not canon, and therefore irrelevant to this application (appearance aside, as it's basically just an update on an old character design). Falcon is a fairly different character inside of his own franchise, both in personality and abilities. No Falcon Punches here, folks: the pyrokinetic kung-fu was basically made up for Smash Bros. and doesn't appear in main-timeline games, which, for our purposes are F-Zero (and the tie-in comic), F-Zero X, and F-Zero GX/AX.

✖ Canon Setting:
Earth, and various other planets in the late 2560s/early 2570s. Humanity has long-since made first contact, achieved faster-than-light travel, and established trade relations with lifeforms across the galaxy. The result is an interconnected network of worlds, one of those overly-simplified universes with Beach Planet, Snow Planet, Desert Planet, Plant Planet, Sentient Computer Planet, etc. Earth itself has become incredibly technologically advanced thanks to its involvement, and now hosts several intergalactic cultural and commerce centers, the largest and most notable of which is a metropolitan hub called Mute City. A Galactic Federation (along with their requisite space military/police forces) handles interplanetary relationships, keeps the peace, and acts as an overarching government body.

Somewhere along the line, a bunch of rich space businessmen got tired of all the cultural exchange and decided they needed a super exciting, super dangerous spectator sport before they all died of boredom. With the advent of improved anti-gravity technology and plasma fuel systems in vehicles, the obvious solution was to form and sponsor a hovercar racing league.

With the influence (and disposable income) of these rich space businessmen, courses sprung up across the galaxy (with several notable courses on Earth itself), and in 2560 the F-Zero Grand Prix was born.

Society in general is kind of obsessed with this sport. Prize money reaches millions of credits, attracting some incredibly unique (to put it lightly) individuals to the competition. Successful pilots are superstars, and they run the gamut of Federation troops, mechanics, robots and cyborgs, all manner of aliens, time travelers, genetically-engineered anthropomorphic dinosaurs, and undead skeleton wizards. Falcon is, astoundingly, the normal one.

F-Zero racing is sometimes more than just weekend entertainment--it's also a place to hold grudge matches, which is entirely possible (perhaps even encouraged) given rich space businessmen prioritization of excitement over strict regulation. In fact, a race seems to be a common way for people to settle scores. Someone pissed you off? Challenge them to a race. Want them dead? KILL THEM WITH YOUR CAR.

Because of this, the races are essentially neutral territory and less-than-savory personnel (outlaws, crime lords, homicidal clones with massive inferiority complexes), are permitted to enter, even if they're obviously out for the blood of other pilots. Good racing drama trumps safety.

This is actually pretty bad news--nobody wants millions of space credits to end up with someone who's going to use it to blow up the galaxy, so the sport sees law enforcement and hired guns racing in turn, all hoping to prevent the money from falling into the wrong hands. Bounty hunting (Falcon's primary career) is a perfectly acceptable and insanely profitable profession--if you're good at it (which he is). And, hey, if you can stop bad guys on the tracks and claim the prize money for yourself, it's a win-win, right?

✖ Character History:
For the kind of game it is, F-Zero is a little needlessly convoluted, and wiki articles reflect that. The franchise spans eight games, some of which are alternate continuities, so in the interest of sparing you any discrepancies or inconsistencies between installments (of which there are a few), we're just gonna sum it all up right here.

Very little is publicly known about Captain Falcon save the fact that he is rumored to hail from a city called Port Town (true) and is similarly rumored to have gained his “Captain” title from being a former officer in the Internova Police Force, your generic paramilitary space cops (also true). Somewhere along the line, Falcon left the Federation, struck out on his own as a bounty hunter, and proved to be very, very good at it. This did, unfortunately, have the side-effect of making a lot of awful people want to kill him, because that's what happens when you show up out of nowhere in a yellow scarf and liberally throw wrenches into the dastardly plots of galactic crime syndicates.

This lifestyle apparently wasn't thrilling enough, so Falcon raced his way into the F-Zero league and proved to be very, very good at that as well, winning the first official Grand Prix in 2560. However, not everyone enjoyed his rise to superstardom, especially the people who already wanted him dead so they could do things like fix races and explode the galaxy.

There was totally a big accident. Foul play was likely but never confirmed, Falcon almost died, a bunch of other pilots did die, and the Galactic Federation was super cheesed. RACING WAS OVER FOREVER.

Here's where Nintendo can't make up its mind: one game states the Federation-mandated suspension was seven years, while the next in the series says four. However, taking into account Falcon's given age in the original F-Zero (early thirties) and his age directly at the reinstatement of the races (36), we're going to say it was four years.

RACING WAS OVER FOR FOUR YEARS.

Eventually, the Feds reinstated the races with a new set of rules, hoping to make the sport safer (spoilers, everyone had been racing a shady illegal underground circuit for the entirety of the suspension and criminals were still allowed to enter for some reason so it wasn't safer at all). Falcon recovered, but not without an unfortunate incident involving the theft of his DNA. These new (vaguely horrific) developments and his continued adventures in bounty hunting forced him to withdraw almost completely from the public eye, spending most of his free time in solitude and security on a chain of islands-with-private-racetracks that he bought with his completely ridiculous gobs of racing-and-bounty-hunting cash.

A year later (F-Zero GX), Falcon more-or-less solidified his status as Sitting Champion and Supreme Posterboy, for better or for worse. He mostly only leaves his Batcave to race and hunt bounty, taking the money and zipping home before anyone can straight-up murder him, which is something that people attempt with increasing frequency. I'll be pulling him from GX's story mode (yes this is a racing game with a story mode), specifically the first two-thirds, which chronicle various and sundry Madcap Adventures where all Falcon wants to do is get to the Grand Prix, but he can't because people keep asking him to do things/challenging him to races/causing massive amounts of property damage/kidnapping his allies/luring him into stupid death traps/strapping bombs to his car.

The CDC agent finds him having just escaped the aforementioned Speed-esque death trap, with the Grand Prix scheduled for the next day.

Character Personality:
I know what you're thinking. Anyone who wants to race a screaming metal death trap at literal mach speeds for ridiculous amounts of cash has to be crazy, and you would be right. Falcon is a little crazy. Eccentric, to put it nicely.

First, though, it's important to realize that he's also full of himself. Heck, he even spells it out for us: "There are two kinds of drivers in this race--me and the losers". If that's not a guy with an ego the size of the moon, I don't know what to tell you. Naturally competitive, he's cocksure, arrogant, and has complete faith in his abilities. Falcon's general response to being antagonized is usually indifference, if he deigns to say anything at all, even responding to a major rival's challenge by quite literally waving them off. The very thought that anyone (and I mean anyone: fellow bounty hunters, crime bosses, evil overlords, etc.) could possibly best him at high-speed hovercar racing is nearly inconceivable, as far as he's concerned, and he'll say as much. Given his de-facto racing game protagonist status, we never actually see him lose, but it's safe to assume that though he's sportsmanlike and recognizes talent when he sees it, coming up short is something he dislikes.

This is someone who has built his entire livelihood on First Place both on the track and in the cutthroat world of bounty hunting, and he settles for absolutely nothing less. He is the best at what he does. He knows it. He will not hesitate to let others know it, and often apprehends criminals on the turf of other bounty hunters, with little regard for the fact that it makes those other bounty hunters kind of angry. If someone can't keep up with him (both literally and figuratively), he generally doesn't consider them worth his valuable time.

Despite the aforementioned inflated sense of self importance, Falcon is a relatively decent guy--you don't get to be a poster boy if you're an unlikeable jerk, after all. He's fairly amicable, not adverse to snappy banter, and is willing to lend his talents to those who need them (rescuing a Federation officer from a self-destructing building, for example), though he does so with an impenetrable air of professionalism. This makes him come off as aloof, a quality only exacerbated by the fact that he takes his dual professions very seriously. Falcon is pretty much all business all the time, even towards those who are ostensibly his allies.

His line of work necessitates a certain degree of intelligence, but he can be impulsive to a fault, the direct result of a driven (ha ha), goal-oriented mindset, and a sense of personal responsibility toward the less-than-friendly individuals who actively endanger others to get to him. Combined with his philosophy that you make your own luck and don't get anywhere without being bold, he takes high-risk approaches with the hope of high return. Falcon is a thrill-seeker (what likely brought him to F-Zero in the first place) and may or may not think he is somewhat invincible. This, combined with a tendency to be headstrong, gets him in trouble (running headfirst without backup into an archenemy's destructive rampage ends with that aforementioned bomb strapped to his car), but it makes for good racing drama: a great deal of his popularity stems directly from his never-say-die attitude, incredible tenacity and refusal to back down from a challenge.

It's those qualities, however, that have garnered him an equal amount of enemies: at least a half dozen racers profess their desire to get him out of the way, in publicly-broadcast interviews, no less. Underneath the bravado and showmanship for television cameras, he's not much of a talker and is inclined to be fairly paranoid, going to great lengths to protect himself and conceal his personal information. Having the admiration of the general public is all well and good, but when a solid half of your racing colleagues want to kill you, it wears a guy down. Though he has cohorts (mostly Federation-types), Falcon is an enigmatic loner by necessity, doesn't trust easily, and keeps most everyone at arm's length, both for his safety and theirs. Solitude gives him security, but effectively traps him in a career where ruthlessness and duplicity is the norm. He can certainly be both. The helmet isn't just for racing, after all, and nobody sees him without it.

He's fairly preoccupied with doing the "right" thing, whatever the "right" thing means in a morally-gray, slightly questionable profession that mostly involves offing people for money. His intentions are good, at least, and he does try to uphold some kind of code of honor--for example, trying to convince an enemy to settle their grudge on the track, rather than put civilians and public property in the line of fire. He considers such behavior cowardly and prefers to avoid unnecessary chaos if at all possible. Because he is so skilled at what he does, he devotes himself fully to thwarting the plans of those who would otherwise endanger millions, at the expense of his own safety and security. Still, he has no choice but to come to terms with it--if he can't be a galactic defender, who else will? He'll keep winning. It's what he's good at, after all.

✖ Character Powers & Skills:
✪ Falcon is a talented pilot of spacecraft (he has a mid-sized transport of his own), but where really shines is behind the wheel of ground vehicles, most notably hovercraft. This guy is sitting champion for a reason--we're talking incredible reflexes and serious automotive moves.

✪ It's also implied that he's a fair mechanic, technologically savvy, and mechanically-minded in general. Considering he's all about the motif, it's entirely likely that both his vehicle and his ship are of his own design, if not of his own execution. The whole living-alone-on-an-island-being-super-paranoid thing sort of necessitates that he's able to maintain his modes of transportation all by himself, and his F-Zero machine in particular is so finely tuned that it's arguably one of the most balanced vehicles on the circuit.

✪ He's no slouch at hand-to-hand, and he knows his way around a gun. He was, at one point in his career, part of an elite paramilitary police force, so he is formally combat trained, and regularly subdues all kinds of lawbreakers, wanted dead or alive. He can more than hold his own in a fight.

✪ As a bounty hunter, Falcon is known as resourceful and tenacious. Locating his targets requires him to be both proficient at tracking and skilled at mining for information/intel.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
✖ First Person POV:
[ x ] [ x ] [ x ] [ x ]

✖ Third Person POV:
"Let me get this straight," he says, pointing across the table with the hand he's using to hold his glass. "You're talking total planetary destruction."

"I am."

Falcon frowns and drags a hand across the visible part of his face in thought. He's silent for a long moment, but the man partially obscured by the dim lighting and haze of the bar seems more than content to wait for a response. There's a lot wrong with this proposition, not the least of which is the potential for genocide, but Falcon has never exactly been beyond getting dirty if the greater good is involved. None of that actually makes it out of his mouth. "I have the Grand Prix."

It feels like a terrible excuse, like he's calling in sick on the morning of a presentation, except the presentation is the fate of the universe. If he really wants to get technical, he's a bounty hunter first, race car driver second, and if the situation is as serious as this guy says, then his talents are necessary. More than necessary. Earth has already been targeted by this demolition crew, but by joining their ranks, he can prevent that. He just has to aid in the destruction of an unspecified number of other planets, first, which doesn't exactly sit well with him. He wants to ask what the Federation thinks of all this, if it wasn't their idea in the first place.

"I understand you're very busy, Captain--"

"Very busy," he confirms somewhat curtly through a sip of his drink. Falcon waves a hand dismissively and the man falls silent so that he can continue his train of thought. It's an obvious attempt to justify his reasoning not only to the CDC agent, but also to himself, to make it feel like less of a cop-out. "There are...certain pilots," he starts, clearly thinking of how to best say this as he goes. "If they win, you don't want to know the kinds of things they'll do with that prize money."

"You need to attend so that you can beat them. Make sure the funds stay out of the wrong hands. It's an important race, I understand. You're very impressive, as far as that's concerned."

I understand. A vaguely bitter laugh escapes him at the repetition of that particular phrase, like the guy knows all about the complexities of his existence, or something. There's a part of him that's sure he's being played: whoever sent this man knows him, somehow, said to turn up the flattery, to go right for the ego. That same part of him knows that it's working. Another part hates how dismissive the man is of the race, like it's just some dumb contest, and yet another part is undeniably curious about this strange organization.

"What if I told you we could take care of it?"

"If you're talking about fixing the Grand Prix, that's not--" It isn't what the agent is talking about. Falcon, though clearly incensed at the prospect of a fixed race, knows that before he's even cut off.

"We don't, unfortunately, have the luxury of time. The most I can offer you is a guarantee that your absence will not be detrimental. Quite the opposite, actually. Your talents are needed elsewhere, Captain. Immediately."

He's pretty sure this has just taken a turn into blackmail town, with the added implication that if he doesn't sign himself over to planet-destroying, there won't be a Grand Prix, because they'll explode the Earth the instant he refuses. Falcon doesn't like it, of course, but the more the guy talks, the more he gets the impression that he's not actually being offered a choice. The sudden feeling of being boxed in, of beingpainted into a corner hits him right in the pit of his stomach.

"Fine," he says after a prolonged pause. At the very least, he can see what this is all supposed to be about. There are more important things than winning races. "But I get to bring my machine."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'll go with you, but the car comes too. It's non-negotiable."

The CDC agent smiles, and the boxed-in feeling only worsens. "Welcome aboard."

CHARACTER ITEMS.
✖ Pick a Team:
Green: Falcon has both the combat and piloting skills to fill an assault role within the CDC. He has a law enforcement background, is trained and highly skilled in both weaponry and hand-to-hand, and is a capable pilot of both spacecraft and ground vehicles. Coming from an advanced, space-faring society, he'll likely find the CDC to be on a level of technology that he's accustomed to using.

Red: As a bounty hunter, Falcon tracks and captures all manner of criminals on a regular basis. He's made a name for himself subduing and eliminating dangerous targets, something that often involves covert operations and underground dealings. What he sometimes lacks in discretion, however, he makes up for in resourcefulness and efficiency.


✖ Reason for Joining the CDC:
Sometimes, there are more important things than winning races, and after being told that it was either join the CDC or have his own world destroyed, he realized that he had little choice. That doesn't mean, of course, that he enjoys the idea of exploding other planets, but he's also undeniably curious about this mysterious organization. He's on board partly to save his own planet, and partly to see what this CDC business is really about--how they function, what their motives (both overt and ulterior) are, and ultimately, if they need to be stopped (he suspects they might need to be stopped, and it's always a good idea to know one's enemy).

He'll keep his ethical quandaries to himself, to start, mostly because it's counterproductive. He's willing to be a little morally gray if it means he can ensure the safety of his world and learn what the CDC might really want in the process. Falcon's a "greater good" kind of guy, and he'll play along while he determines the true scope of the operations.

✖ Mission Freebie:
✪ The Blue Falcon, a 1.2-ton antigravity dream machine. It's his baby, please give it back to him.

✖ Personal Item or Weapon:

✪ His gun, which is your standard laser pistol.

✖ Character Inventory:

✪ Flight suit
✪ Boots
✪ Belt + gun holster
✪ Gloves
✪ Scarf
✪ Helmet