LifeAftr App

[deadlylittlething]

Player Information
Name:Laura
Age: 31
Contact: wonderfulnonsense
Current characters: Lup
Character Information
Name: Number Five
Series: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix adaptation)
Appearance: coffee!, adorable!, short!
Age: 58, but recently stuck in his 13-year-old body due to time travel shenanigans
Canon Point: end of season 1
Canon History: One day I’ll app from a canon that doesn’t have a shitty wiki and I won’t have to summarize the whole thing…

On October 1st 1989, 43 children were born to mothers who had shown no signs of pregnancy minutes before. Yikes! Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire, set out to find and buy/adopt as many of these children as he could. He got seven of them and founded the Umbrella Academy to test and train them. All of the children developed some kind of supernatural ability, like super strength, communicating with the dead, the ability to make people believe a lie, etc.

Unfortunately for the children, Hargreeves had no interest in raising them as a father, instead treating them like experiments and child soldiers being trained to defend humankind from some undefined threat. Their childhood was strictly regimented and all of them were expected to perform extraordinarily. When they were four, he built them a robot “mom” to be their caretaker and provide what little affection he couldn’t or was unwilling to give himself, including giving them normal person names, since Hargreeves himself strictly referred to them as Number One through Seven. Starting at about age 12, they were sent on missions to stop criminals and supervillains, and they became famous celebrities with their own comics and a big fanbase worldwide.

Number Five’s power was travelling instantly between two points in space. Until age 13, he trained along with his siblings and practiced his spatial jumps under Hargreeves’ instructions. Being an extremely intelligent and prideful child, he demanded to learn how to jump through time as well. Hargreeves forbid him from trying, since it’s much more complicated than spatial jumps and the effects it would have on his body and mind would be unpredictable; he wasn’t ready yet. Five, of course, ran away from home and jumped forward in time anyway.

He managed a few jumps forward, until he landed in a devastated, post-apocalyptic hellscape devoid of life and still on fire. He found a newspaper dated April 1st 2019, the day of the apocalypse. He also found the corpses of his adult siblings in the rubble, one of them clutching a prosthetic eye that he presumably ripped out of whoever caused the end of the world, trying to stop them and failing.

Five, inexperienced with time travel, was unable to jump back.

He survived for about 45 years in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, living on scraps and his training, utilizing the ruins of humanity, never encountering another human being. He found an autobiography written by one of his siblings, Vanya, who apparently never developed a power and was therefore mercilessly excluded from “family life”, such as it were. Through the book, he learned what damaged adults his siblings turned into and how most of them left home eventually, despising their father for their loveless, brutal upbringing. Five resolved to travel back in time to stop the apocalypse and worked desperately for 45 years to find the right spatio-temporal equations that would let him jump through time accurately.

One day, another person appeared out of thin air, a woman calling herself the Handler. She explained that she was looking to recruit him for the Temps Commission, an organization with time travel technology that was tasked with the preservation of the timeline through manipulation and removals of people who, through their free will, threaten the “correct” order of events. Not wanting to remain alone in the wasteland, Five accepted the job and became a highly trained temporal assassin. Unbeknownst to his employer, who had a vested interest in the apocalypse happening as it should, this job afforded him the opportunity to finally finish his calculations. He broke his contract to jump to a week before the apocalypse, but unfortunately his equations were slightly off and his body accidentally regressed to age 13.

Not that he had time to deal with being a 58-year-old traumatized trained killer in the body of a child because y’know, the apocalypse. His estranged siblings had just come together to commemorate their father’s passing and got up to various dysfunctional hijinks around him while he remained single-mindedly focused on following his only lead for the cause of the end of the world, the serial number of the prosthetic eye. This lead was eventually destroyed by Commission agents Hazel and Cha-Cha, who were sent to stop him. So he figured out a new plan and got himself re-hired by the Handler, this time to work at Headquarters as one of the bureaucrats figuring out which individuals in time need killing to protect the timeline. He immediately intercepted a message sent to Hazel and Cha-Cha saying to “protect Harold Jenkins”, blew up HQ and traveled back to before the apocalypse. He reasoned that Harold Jenkins must be the person responsible for the apocalypse and finally got his siblings together to stop the end of the world.

Harold Jenkins, turns out, had been romancing his sister Vanya, the one who had always been ostracized from the family because of her lack of powers. Surprise, she had powers all along! She was able to convert sound into powerful energetic shockwaves but proved to be so powerful and dangerous as a 4-year-old that Hargreeves numbed her with medication and had her sister Allison use her power on Vanya to make her believe she was ordinary. Harold had found out about this and had manipulated her in order to access her powers. Vanya, furious and unable to control her emotions, ended up killing him and cutting Allison’s throat, though she survived. When she returned to the Academy to ask for forgiveness, some of the siblings decided it was a good idea to lock her up in the soundproof chamber that Hargreeves had imprisoned her in as a child. AND BY SOME I MEAN LUTHER though the others didn’t try very hard to stop him, and Five was out of the house thinking the apocalypse was actually over because they had found Harold dead.

Understandably, Vanya hulked the fuck out and destroyed the entire Academy. Five realized that Harold was the fuse but Vanya was the bomb, and the siblings went to stop her. They did, but inadvertently caused her to release a massive amount of energy into the moon, which broke up and fell towards the Earth. Yeah, these assholes found a way to actually cause the apocalypse. In the moments before impact, Five decided the only chance they had to fix this was to use his ability to jump through time again, this time taking all his siblings with him.


Personality: Vanya's book describes Five as "prone to outbursts and arrogance even more so than the average preteen" and Luther mentions that he had always thought he was better than the rest of them, even as a kid. He was a child with exceptional intelligence and seemingly the only one of the siblings who figured out very early on that their father's approval and affection was impossible to attain, and therefore meaningless. While Number One and Two were competing for their father's attention and Number Seven suffered from being very obviously the least favorite, "useless" child, Five was constantly butting heads with Hargreeves, rebellious and demanding and focused on improving his abilities. The creator has said that Five actively rejected the name that Mom tried to give him because he realized the numbers were just as meaningless and he refused to play Hargreeves' games.

This tendency to consider himself better and smarter than others of course wasn't helped by being stranded in complete isolation after the apocalypse, growing up as the only person with the ability and knowledge to save humankind. He was also mostly unable to emotionally mature, still just as prone to anger, impatience, stubbornness, solving his problems with violence or by storming off, and almost no social skills or graces. For wanting to save humankind so bad, he gets fed up with people very quickly, flings insults and scarcasm at everyone and doesn't try to hide his disdain for their stupidity. His powers come in handy here, because he'll simply disappear when he's had enough of a conversation. He shows his superiority with smugness and takes pride in being the best assassin the Commission had, even though he claims not to have enjoyed the killing.

His personality is of course heavily shaped by having to fight for survival in a desolate wasteland. The isolation has taken a heavy toll on his mental health. He formed a strong emotional bond with a mannequin that he named Dolores, holding entire conversations with her, telling people he wasn't completely alone because he had her. Even once he's back with his siblings, he refuses to tell them about the end of the world or reconnect with them much, instead trying to stop it on his own. But, needing emotional support nonetheless, he finds Dolores in a department store in the "present" and carries her around everywhere. He's also shown to have flashbacks to the apocalypse and he is completely obsessed with stopping it. He doesn't stop to rest during the week except when he gets pass-out drunk after his only lead is destroyed, and when he collapses from a shrapnel wound he doesn't tell anyone about until it almost kills him. He seems to run on coffee and alcohol the entire time, he doesn't really know how to function outside of survival mode, doesn't take time to enjoy things or look after himself.

He is analytical and pragmatic, moving from one plan to stop the apocalypse to the next. While he understands that killing innocent people for the sake of the timeline wasn't great and he seems weary of his assassin past and disgusted with the Commission, it's all justified by the need to get back to his family and save the world. Even when it looks like they'll have to go after Vanya to stop the apocalypse, he agrees to it quickly because if they don't stop her she'll just die with everybody else.

Despite his acerbic nature and his difficulties connecting with people, it's obvious he cares about his family, doing everything he can to save not only the world but them in particular. Finding their corpses as a child still haunts him and he tries to keep them away from his plans to stop the apocalypse at first not just because he thinks they're incompetent, but also because he wants to keep them away from what killed them. He also wasn't around for a lot of the things that drove a wedge between the siblings, like the death of Number Six, everyone but Luther leaving the team, and the publication of Vanya's book. Of course, his priorities are rather different from everyone else's during the show anyway, between PETTY HUMAN PROBLEMS and THE LITERAL END OF THE WORLD.

His conversations with Vanya show that he is capable of being respectful and sincere, even complimenting her book, which gives the impression that she is perhaps his favorite sibling despite her being "ordinary". He notices Klaus having a tough time after accidentally time traveling to the goddamn Vietnam War, prompting him to talk about it, though it's quickly overtaken by a new plan to stop the apocalypse. He's exceptionally gentle with Dolores, both physically and verbally. He is also capable of self-reflection, admitting that he never thought about what he would do after stopping the apocalypse, and realizing he needs to say goodbye to Dolores if he wants to be able to "grow up" and learn how to form emotional connections to his siblings. So he returns her to her friends in the department store and makes sure she gets dressed in nice new clothes AND IT'S REALLY CUTE OKAY.


Abilities: His fast travel ability isn't super well explained in the show but it seems to work by warping space around him. It's shown mostly within line of sight, though he also jumps into buildings and moving cars, but since it seems to require calculations done in his head I assume it works best for distances he can see or to places he is already familiar with. It also comes with a convenient exhaustion caveat - when he jumps rapidly several times in a row he becomes physically exhausted, and if he continues to push himself he is eventually unable to jump completely until he's taken a rest.

Time travel with his ability is a crapshoot, especially without years of precise calculations done in advance. This is of course nerfed entirely in LifeAftr.

Five is a genius with particular knowledge in temporal physics, and of course he's had combat and survival training since he was a little kid. He's a professional assassin so I will assume familiarity with a variety of weapons and techniques, and while he has the physical strength of a 13-year-old, this knowledge and his spatial jumps still make him extremely deadly.

Also he's a classy alcoholic who knows how to mix his own drinks. The Denny would be lucky to have him.

Inventory: Homeboy has an adorable schoolboy uniform and bowling shoes. That's it.

Sample

Thread Sample: On the TDM

Q&A: DON'T STRESS YOURSELVES MY BBS but I would love a Q&A if the thread sample isn't sufficient.