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Player.

Name: Ana
Contact: cuddlebug / Ana#1461
Current Characters: n/a

Character.

Name: Drake Holloway
Canon: iZombie
Canon Point: Season 2 Episode 19, Salivation Army. Drake has just sacrificed his life to buy the kidnapping victims/test subjects in the Max Rager lab more time to be rescued.
CRAU Timeline/Game(s): 23.5 months in hadriel

Character History: Zombies are real. And some of them were made via a mix of a tainted drug called utopium and a drink called Max Rager during a boat party. Enter Liv Moore, an aspiring cardiologist in the wrong place at the wrong time, now a zombie. She goes to work in a morgue with the dead instead of the living, stealing brains to survive without hurting anyone. Her colleague Ravi finds her out and becomes an ally, working to "cure" her infection/mutation and return her to human status. To do so, however, he needs more of the drugs that caused the outbreak.

When we first meet Drake, he’s still human and dying of a gunshot wound. Blaine, the local drug-and-brain dealer Liv enlisted to find more tainted utopium, tracked him down as the last person who might know where to find the remaining stash... and got him shot. Blaine brings him to Liv near death and she deems him too far gone for conventional medicine, meaning her only choice to save Drake and subsequently humanity is to scratch him and turn him into a zombie as well. Upon waking he tells them what he knows and gets the “welcome to team Z” speech from Blaine, which he takes extraordinarily well. “Tell me what I need to do to get these brains,” he says, as much like Liv he doesn’t want to hurt anyone to survive. From then on he’s dependent on Blaine, made to spy on Mr Boss (a local crime lord he's "working" for) in exchange for brains.

Drake gives Blaine the information he demands but unfortunately for him Blaine has a deal going with the district attorney’s office and feeds too much of Drake’s intel to the DA, endangering him since he’s the rat. Not wanting to deal with Blaine anymore, Drake goes to Liv to thank her for saving his life and ask if he can get brains from her at the morgue instead. She turns him down, saying she doesn’t know him yet to give him brains, but she’d like to.

They start seeing each other but Drake has to bail and bluff all the time to cover the fact that he’s not actually a bouncer... or a criminal. He's an undercover cop placed in Mr Boss’ organization. The cops want him to break up with Liv but he says she’s the only good thing in his life and he won’t give her up. Still, to protect them both Drake is increasingly cagey about his activities when they’re not together -- Liv decides to confront him but that night Drake is kidnapped by Max Rager's zombie-killer, who isn't actually killing the zombies on his list but freezing them until a cure is made. Drake wound up next on the list because he stood up to Blaine, who's choosing who gets "hit" after one of his customers trapped the hitman and... you know, it’s a long complicated explanation that doesn’t really concern Drake. Fast forward!

Drake spends awhile in the freezer until the Max Rager team (who knew they were partially responsible for the outbreak and consider the hit list cleaning up a potential PR mess) find out their hitman wasn’t killing the zombies on their list but sticking them in a freezer. Additionally, the CEO's daughter has been infected, causing their focus to shift from zombie genocide to medical experimentation. They rekidnap the kidnappees and lock them up in their secret underground lab to test potential cure formulas on. They only make it worse, as the first few subjects taken from the cell come back full Romero, a mindless version of zombie that cannot be cured. To protect the others and buy them more time to be rescued, Drake volunteers to go next, and also comes back a Romero. Mindless, empty, starving.

The last thing he remembers before waking up in Hadriel is getting the injection that doomed him.

CRAU History: Despite only spending about two years there, Hadriel represented some of the best and worst times in Drake's life. The first thing he did was join the Guard, a PC organization that strove to protect the city inhabitants from both monsters and one another whenever necessary. He made fast friends with its leaders and ultimately became the head of recruitment and training, especially with its younger members. In fact, Hadriel was where he found some of the best friends he's ever had in his life, people willing to do absolutely anything for him. See, it didn't take long for Drake to figure out that his zombie nature was going to be a huge problem he needed to keep hidden, as the city had several zombie apocalypse survivors that would have killed him on principle. Thanks to a little help from his friends this never happened, despite the fact that Drake starved three times over the course of the game and each time had to be restrained and hidden -- in one case an already dying friend offered her brain to sustain him a little longer, in another he had to be frozen solid and watched over for a month and a half when the gods (who kept him fed) were missing from the city. His friends always had his back and accepted him as he was, including one who turned into something more, a partner who actively changed for the better because of their relationship.

Drake lived through the gods' emotional manipulations (which included antics such as dream walks, memory shares, hallucinating your worst fears, paranoia flu, and so on), the city nearly burning down, the first Null invasion, extreme setting changes and countless monster attacks, all as a zombie. After such antics as being burned alive, shot straight in the chest, and winding up the sole survivor of a god attack, he felt like he was more useful staying that way despite the fact that being a zombie objectively sucks, because of his increased strength and capacity for damage. Starving made him dangerous on occasion but if he were human, he couldn't play meat shield for the rest of the city anywhere near as effectively. It wasn't until right before the final invasion that Drake decided to take the gods up on their offer to make him human again, a deal that required him to die and be resurrected in a new body. He then fought in the final Null invasion as human, something incredibly risky, but he figured if they won he'd be free to go to any world he chose and if they lost it wouldn't matter anyway. Luckily, Hadriel won the war against the Null and Drake and his (also dead back home) now-fiancé decided to go to a different world and make a new life.

He's gonna be pretty upset that things didn't actually work out as planned for him.

Personality: Drake Holloway is a good man with a checkered past that he doesn’t let define him. As a young man he was hot-tempered and prone to snapping, finally letting his natural protectiveness take over when his mother’s boyfriend beat her (again) one night. Frank was one in a string of many abusers, including Drake's own father, and nineteen years of that bullshit was enough. He was left paralyzed in the ensuing fight and Drake was actually sent to prison for two years, the judge declaring he “went overboard.” He was left having to find a way to deal with his anger and violent tendencies, because his motivation is to protect people, not hurt them. He ultimately channeled that conviction into crime fighting. Whatever it took, whatever he could do, including going undercover beneath Seattle’s biggest crime lord.

In general, Drake is an incredibly caring, devoted person. He's nonjudgmental and supportive, the guy who plays therapist to all his friends, the guy you call when you're a drug dealer in the trunk of a car being driven to a kill spot. Drake's entire existence is based on doing his best at all times, being better than the person he was and trying to save as many people as he can, from whatever they need to be saved from. Criminals, addictions, bad relationships... he'll do whatever he can and as long as a person is trying he doesn't give up on them. He's also an excellent son, always there for his mother’s calls, rushing over if anything goes wrong at her place, and pretending to love her terrible gifts. With Liv, Drake is as honest as he can be without endangering both their lives, even going so far as to explain his violent history. The people he loves are Drake's highest priority, then anyone else who might need his help, then himself.

Drake has spent a long time dealing with the issues that nearly ruined his life in the first place. He now defuses situations with humor whenever possible, and is generally extremely chill. Although he experiences fear and anger he's very brave and very controlled, things roll off his back and he doesn’t rise to anyone’s taunts or threats -- he’s even able to fight off “full on zombie mode,” a fight response to danger, to keep from hurting humans. The whole zombie situation also shows his adaptability, how readily he accepts this new existence with almost no adjustment period, and the lengths to which he'll go to keep others safe. He's risking everything snitching to Blaine for brains because he's unwilling to hurt anyone else.

Being so self-sacrificing is Drake's downfall in more ways than one, though. He never wants to put anyone out, never wants to ask for help for himself, and can be seen as secretive or closed off because of that, exes telling him that he "puts up walls" in relationships. His self worth is very much based on what he is to other people, what he can do for them and how he behaves with them. For someone so devoted to others he has very few true connections, his relationships unbalanced because his priorities skew so dramatically in favor of everyone else. As much as he doesn't want to lose Liv, he doesn't let her in, either. Drake can be a difficult person to get to know, not just because of the double triple life, and is used to things going badly when he does do something for himself.

CRAU Development: The most significant change to Drake's characterization after his time in game is fairly subtle, and entirely CR driven. He's finally learning to let people in. Very quickly, Drake realized that to survive in Hadriel he had to admit certain things about himself to others. Things he wouldn't usually share, and although in some instances he was forced to do so, no one ever let him down. His instincts on who to trust were generally accurate and most people immediately wanted to help, offering protection and concern... that he slowly (very slowly) learned to accept. He had friends who had his back, that circumstances pushed him to rely on from time to time despite his discomfort with appearing vulnerable, with stepping outside the concept of himself he'd built up over the past decade. Although it's an ongoing process and he's still most comfortable in the protector-helper-shoulder to lean on role (especially with new people, it can still take him awhile to open up), for the first time in his life he's made several truly well-balanced connections. People who wanted him to lean on them in return, and Drake came to find these new, deeper relationships incredibly rewarding. Something he'd always acknowledged were great for other people, but hadn't been letting himself have. It's a process and he still has significant defenses, but people have gotten beyond the wall and he's gotten to a place where he likes having them there.

Powers/Abilities: Drake is human again now, totally normal.

Inventory: The clothes he's wearing, a handgun (no ammo), a small utility knife, a silver and black promise ring, a wrist-mounted light shield, and a duffel bag with some spare clothes, his Hadriel communication device, a family photo album, and several full sketchbooks.

Anything Else? I know convicts cannot go into law enforcement in the real world, so it’s possible this is part of his cover identity but the scar he says he got in that fight is real and something he'd been dodging talking about before, and Drake never once lies to Liv otherwise -- he merely omits certain details. Therefore I play it that he was in fact in prison and this reality allowed him to become a cop anyway. I suspect this was a mistake, a result of the writers changing his storyline late in the season, but how you interpret it (as the truth or a cover) could dramatically change his characterization, so I thought it necessary to discuss somewhere.

samples

Network Sample: inbox text thread

Prose/Brackets Sample: memory share event (though honestly nearly everything on his thread tracker is logs...)