InsaneJournal

Considering that she's not only the baby of the family but also the only girl, it would be easy to assume that Gwen might feel smothered, sheltered or overshadowed by her siblings, but this isn't true. There's a balance in their family. Each person has their unique role, the thing that they can bring to the table to keep the rest of them safe. Gwen sees and understands this. It allows her to be confident in her own abilities and place within the system. This isn't to say that she doesn't sometimes doubt herself or feel like she's made a mistake because those sorts of things are part and parcel of their lives and their work, but she doesn't spend ages beating herself up or comparing herself to her brothers. Especially because she knows that they both know she is more than capable of taking care of herself if the needs arises. Part of her role is making sure that doesn't happen and then picking up the pieces if it does.

Where Max is good at getting what he wants from people, Gwen is good at getting what she wants from technology. Something about code and numbers and hacking into protected programs makes sense to her, and it always has. Her tech skills have kept them out of a lot of jams and gotten them into a lot of places and provided them with a lot of information that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This skill also translates pretty well into the creation of traps. Gwen likes to take a cerebral approach to everything, and she believes that this is always possible. Give her a little bit of time, and she'll be able to point out the best paths in and out of any building and find patterns and weak points that can be exploited. The problem sometimes can be getting her brothers to share her patience.

Gwen is patient. Patient and quiet and thoughtful. A lot of the time, she prefers to let Max take the lead when they're taking to people because she doesn't get a lot of humor and tends to pick people's words and logic apart when given the chance. As a result her own attempts at humor tend to fall flat and are normally studded with strange allusions that most people don't get. The opposite is true when she's hanging out with her brothers. With them Gwen simply acts like one of the boys, which she has been for most of her life. It's all crass jokes and poking fun at each other and wandering around whatever hotel they're staying at in their clothes, killing spiders for Max and fixing up Luke when he invariably manages to get himself injured.

Most of the time she argues with Luke because of how brash he is, how much he wants to just leap into the line of fire and put himself in danger, which is a stupid reaction. And Gwen gets annoyed very quickly with anything she deems idiotic. She also doesn't appreciate the way he sometimes treats her and Max like kids rather than equals. It takes a long time for her to blow, she will and it's usually rather violent.

Also like a machine, Gwen is able to separate herself from the killing. No matter how much tech support or medic work she provides, she is a hunter, and she will kill. Often she kills in the quickest, cleanest, least emotional way possible. It's a compartmentalized, programmed reaction to danger. In the simplest terms, it's a them or us circumstance to her. Family pwns everything. It always will. There's no way around that. She's not cold, though. She loves her family deeply, but she's able to turn that portion of herself off when necessary.

Strengths:

Medic - Gwen serves as the healer for the group, patching up her brothers and herself as needed when they get into their various scraps. There are a number of things that are outside her area of expertise, but she's got enough knowledge to do a lot of damage control.

Ghost in the Machine - Think your data is safe? Think no one could possibly get past your encryption to erase their records and make sure you don't have any evidence on them? Think again because Gwen already got in and deleted everything including things you didn't even have. And she left you a lovely little untraceable present at the same time. If it's technology related, Gwen can and will make it her bitch.

Weaknesses:

Paranoid Android - Gwen is a little obsessed with conspiracy theories. This is not limited to the well known ones out there such as who shot President Kennedy or whether Michael Jackson is still alive but also includes ones that she has dreamed up on her own or discovered in the deepest, darkest recesses of the internet. Sometimes she gets a little too involved in these things and can sound like a crazy person.

One Track Mind - While Gwen is perfectly capable of doing a large number of tasks at the same time, she can get pretty involved and then forget to take a break to eat, go outside, go turn off the stove, etc. This is one area where she has to rely on Max to drag her away from the cerebral fortresses she builds herself into to make sure that she doesn't forget the outside world.

One of the Guys - Most of her life has been spent in the company of her brothers. Being pulled out of school at the age of eight and being trained in a male dominated trade, Gwen doesn't have a lot of experience actually behaving like or being a girl, which makes it difficult for her to attempt to infiltrate herself into situations since she sticks out like a sore thumb. She's not a natural actor like Max, and is typically only really comfortable around Max, Luke or her computer equipment.

Gwen is the youngest of the Boone clan although she's always quick to remind Max that he didn't beat her by much. Along with her parents and brothers, Gwen enjoyed what she considered a fairly normal and happy childhood in Detroit. She was always the quickest to take to technology and was happily working her way through computers and code and systems from an early age. It didn't take her long to concoct and teach Max signals they could use to communicate non-verbally, which is something that they still use fairly regularly and has been supplemented with ASL in some cases.

Like her brothers, Gwen was trained to be a hunter although in the beginning a lot of her lessons focused on technology and medical related issues as she showed a great proficiency for those. Not wanting to be left out, though, she quickly proved that she was just as capable of wielding a weapon and earned herself more lessons with those as well, though she was by far and away best with anything technology related. Gwen was also very proficient in devising and executing traps much to her parents' delight.

When her parents pulled them out of school to start traveling for more monster hunting, Gwen didn't mind so much. She hadn't really gotten along with a lot of the kids in her class, and she often felt like she was being held back in the classroom because other people learned things slower than she did. Once she was out of that environment, she could focus more on teaching herself things and training with her brothers and parents. More and more, though, her mother and father were out while Luke watched after her and Max. Gwen understand that they were doing something important, though, and did not resent them or hold their activities against them.

One night, though, her parents and Luke set out to try and flush a vamp nest. The end result was not pretty. Luke came home and woke up the twins, telling them to pack because they were going. Max drove while Gwen did everything in her power to patch up her older brother. She was sixteen. Luke didn't need to say a word. Gwen knew that the only way he would have come back without their parents was if they were dead. The only possibly reaction to that was to throw herself even more into the training and hacking, making sure that nothing like that would happen to Max or Luke. They would take the high road, the smart road. They wouldn't stop, but they would prevail.

In the years since, the family has worked as a decent team although Gwen knows that Luke takes some stupid risks on his own now and again mostly because she's the one who gets to bind his wounds and fuss at him about them. They're currently in Washington, D.C. trying to drum up some more marks to take out. Gwen is as happy and settled in the hunting life as anyone could be because she has her family around her, she's part of a whole, an integral line in an even large piece of looped code.