Name: Timothy Lawrence
Canon: Borderlands
Canon Point: end of the Claptastic Voyage DLC
Age: mid-20s
Type of Character: Canon
Reference: Borderlands wikiPersonality: Once upon a time, Timothy Lawrence was a college student, majoring in Creative Writing. Like most college students with useless degrees, his main concerns were graduating, getting a job, and making enough at that job to pay back his ridiculously large student loan debt. It was this desperate need to not be horrifically in debt that drove Tim to the Hyperion Corporation and the body-double program.
Now, Tim is stuck with the face of an asshole for the rest of his life, forced to run around on a moon and shoot people. His life is hard.
ZERO
Tim is, to be completely frank, a dweeb. Before he was Jackified, he was nervous and had a somewhat high-pitched voice, hemming and hawing his way through conversations when he was uncomfortable. He wasn’t charming or smooth or confident. He was easily cowed when other, more confident people tried to persuade him or stonewall him into doing something, even if he wasn’t sure about it. He was a nerdy, freckly, gangly little doormat who didn’t have very many friends or prospects and who mostly went through life trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Even his own mother didn’t like him very much, considering that she laughed whenever she was told that he had died. That’s what he was going into his adventure on Elpis—a nobody shoved into the role of a hero and expected to emulate a man who was supposed to be his better.
HERO
Getting life-altering plastic surgery didn’t completely change Tim, though. He’s still awkward in many ways, especially when it comes to talking to women. Particularly women that he finds attractive; he can barely string together a coherent sentence when he talks to Moxxi, for instance, and mostly just seems to babble out whatever happens to be in his head at that moment. He’s still cripplingly afraid of heights, even though he spends most of his time running around a moon with gravity so low that falling basically has no consequences, unless you fall into lava or something.
Running and gunning on Elpis has, however, had some impact on his character. He’s become a little less nervous and less of a doormat, because there’s probably a threshold of how many bandits you must shoot in the face before answering the phone stops being so anxiety-inducing. He’s still not completely unfazed by all the tentacled crazy that goes on around him, but he does become more sarcastic about it as the story progresses. Tim does not want to be doing this shit, he doesn’t want to be on this weird, horrible moon, and he will let you know how he feels. Tim’s coping mechanism is passive aggressive sarcasm towards his situation at large.
But there is also a part of him that’s not as tiny as he would admit that kind of likes what he’s doing, too.
There’s a part of Tim that likes the powerful feeling of a well-aimed sniper round busting open a bandit’s skull. There’s a part of him that likes the adrenaline rush, the kick that he gets from kicking ass. Tim had been the little nerd that no one paid attention to for a long time, and he does get a vicious, vindictive satisfaction out of being the big man, the badass, the hero. Then something with tentacles shows up and he remembers that everything sucks, too.
Tim is also probably the least jaded of all the vault hunters, though that’s probably not a high bar to pass. He retains a certain sentimentality, and apologizes to books in an undertone when he makes fun of them while pretending to be Jack. He loves cats, and makes stupid faces and baby-talks at pictures of them. When Jack sends Gladstone and the other scientists out an airlock because one of them might be a mole, Tim is horrified, while the other vault hunters are far less affected. Tim is the soft touch of the party, for what that’s worth on a murdermoon like Elpis, even though he really can’t do much to stop all the violence around him. He is the reluctant participant in Jack’s vicious scheme, going along for the ride because he doesn’t have much of a choice and knows it.
By the time Jack has Tim and the other vault hunters dive into Claptrap’s horrible little mind to retrieve corporate secrets, the weight of everything that he’s done is starting to show on him. Tim’s got a temper, and in between the passive aggressive sarcasm and attempts at pretending that he’s disaffected, he gets mad. And when Tim loses it, he sounds very much like Jack.
After the events of the Pre-Sequel and DLCs, Tim eventually abandons Jack—once his fear of what Jack will do if he leaves is eclipsed by his fear of what he’ll do if he stays.
Appearance: Character turnaroundSince Timothy is Jack’s body double in the Pre-Sequel, they are physically identical and wear the same clothes.
Abilities: - Vault hunting – Tim has the general survival skills of a vault hunter. He’s good with firearms, grenades, and other weaponry, and has experience in active combat. He is physically fit, can handle himself in a firefight, and can work within a small group to complete objectives.
- Digi-Jacks – Tim’s special ability summons two digi-structed Jacks to fight with him. These replicas can use weapons, draw enemy fire, and explode upon destruction, among other things, making them valuable allies. The digi-Jacks disappear after taking a small amount of damage or after set time period.
Suitability: Tim is coming in from after TPS DLC but before he leaves Hyperion’s service, and will likely get dragged into Handsome Jack’s schemes. His skillset will likely translate best into exploration, since one of the major parts of being a vault hunter was basically running around on a really hostile planet, trying to find the damn thing, and he'll naturally gravitated to the kind of work that's most familiar to him.
He’ll also really enjoy being in, like, a civilized place with civilized things to do, and he’ll probably try to get involved with the arts community, albeit anonymously to keep Jack from finding out. A Borderlands writer revealed that one of his ambitions is to write a fantasy novel focusing on anthropomorphic bears, so be on the lookout for
A Song of Bees and Honey or something.
Inventory: - 1
Hyperion pistol (loaded with 12 round magazine plus two spare mags)
- 1
orb shield- 1
Oz kit o O2 kits (colloquially called Oz kits on Elpis) are breathing apparatuses that allow survival on the moon’s airless surface. It can also be used for short-range propulsion and buttslams, which are exactly what they sound like.