(no subject)

[shifts]

The term forgery, in the dreaming world, is applied to the act of projecting the image of a person using your own person as a canvas. It is a literal form of identity theft, and used most often during mind crime contracts to put marks at ease or distract them entirely, making the extractor's job much easier.

For an inception, forgery is used as a way to manipulate emotion and direct a particular train of thought. There are times where a rather talented forger could replace the role of an extractor entirely through coaxing needed information from a mark much in the same manner as you would question the subject's projections - but only if the job is vanilla and doesn't involve the need to break into the mark's security box. Because forgers can charge higher fees than extractors due to their talents, most business conglomerates or particularly wealthy patrons are more apt to choosing an extractor over a forger for low-scale jobs to begin with, thus making the need for a forger generally low for most generic information garnering jobs.

The mechanics of forgery are relatively simple. In the same manner that you can change your surroundings in a dream, you can change the self-projected image of your person. The rarity lies in 1) the general lack of demand for forgers in the majority of jobs leading people to find other paths of dreaming roles and 2) most people having too strong a sense of self to be anyone other than themselves in a dream. The self you appear as in dreams is a product of both your subconscious and conscious identity. Thus, it's important to have fluidity, because while the subject - much as they do with their surroundings - can fill in small (albeit important) details, you still have to have the looks, mannerisms, and speech patterns of the person you are forging to solidify the image. The so-called "shapeshift" is, with enough practice, relatively instant. I don't agree with the idea of needing a mirror to change your form - that was likely used for cinematic effect more than anything else. Eames is able to forge into Browning under a sack, to return back to himself while sitting on the edge of the river, and can enter into a dream already forged - all without use of a compact mirror. They likely implemented the mirrors so that they wouldn't need to show a body morph, which would have looked silly, and which generally goes against how quickly things change during actual dreams.

Beyond studying individual people specifically needed for a job, Eames has several "off-hand" forges in case they're needed. The canon one is, obviously, Lovely Blond I've Used Before, but I imagine he also has a certain amount of variability in choices for gender/race/age/etc. While Eames appears to be all about going with the flow and picking things up on the sly as needed, forgeries need to have a certain amount of premeditation to them, otherwise they won't be convincing and identifiably separate people. This is why he chooses to use Lovely Blond I've Used Before as opposed to Busty Asian Beauty I've Just Thought Of And Pulled Out Of My Ass. The whole point of forgery is to be completely unidentifiable as to who the original is, and there is no half-assing that in Eames' world. Every forge he has on off-hand for both in-case moments and deliberate use (sometimes you don't need to do a replication of someone involved in the life of the mark, sometimes you just need a pretty girl wanting to listen to your problems) is kept separate from one another, and he memorizes each of them as separate people, not as masks to put on every now and again. If you start thinking of them in the ways that they aren't real, your forged identity becomes just as fake as the way you think them to be, and they no longer appear to be genuine and realistic people.

This is, generally speaking, why forgery is difficult and a treat to find someone who does it well. Most people are only willing to go so far on their line of what is real and what isn't, particularly in the state of dreams, which can influence how much they're willing to become their forges to make them convincing. It's formulaic for a mid-life identity crisis if you're not careful, because you're changing the way your subconscious image is expressed. This manner of approaching forges also likely makes it difficult to forge children or the deceased. Deceased because you don't have much to base on other than pictures or, if you're lucky, video tapes. Children are complex, and not something he likely does often - it's always difficult to pin down the motivations of someone young (or rather that they have very simple motivations to begin with, something that tends to be overlooked), and even more difficult to get enough time with to observe. When you think about it, though, they're the most influential on a mark with kids. They offer a certain amount of ease in calming the mark, and when the relationship is well developed, there's a certain amount of implicit trust that causes everything to go much more smoothly. When done correctly, the objective is much easier to go through the motions.

People who generally work in dreams have more than one role, particularly when you start adding levels. Just as Arthur is adept as an architect to design the second level for the Saito job as well as host it (revealed in the comic) and Cobb being an ~*~awesome~*~ architect before he got into the illegal side of dreaming, Eames likely has just as much experience besides working as a forger. Adding cut-throughs on mazes can be either from working as a generic sounding-board of an architect before, or - more likely - different tricks he's picked up over the years. His prowess on the third level suggests that (besides probable military training) he's worked as a point, or at least knows enough about it that shooting at militarized projections = distracting them. He also knows how to read the projections, but this is something everyone needs to know, so that's not something exclusive nor spectacular. In general, unless you're running a five-man team every job (which is unlikely because of the expense to the contractor), some people are likely picking up more than one role at a time. Being only a forger likely wouldn't bring in enough of a stability in income or a lot of job opportunity, so this is equally likely for Eames. The only thing more rare than a forger for jobs seems like it would be the chemist, as most groups appear to outsource for their Somnacin (Cobol and Saito jobs) if they don't need specialized compounds.