APPLICATION ( MEADOWLARK ).

[bivariant]

> PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Pax
PRONOUNS: She/her
AGE: 25+
CONTACT: forzare @ plurk

> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Shuos Jedao ( Actually: Kel Cheris, born "Ajewen Cheris" )
CANON: The Machineries of Empire trilogy
AGE: Late twenties ( ~28 ) physically; 400+ mentally
CANON POINT: End of Ninefox Gambit, just before the beginning of Raven Stratagem. At this point, Cheris and Jedao have been betrayed by the Hexarchate and Cheris has consumed the carrion glass remnants of Jedao's ghost, assimilating his memories and mind wholesale.

HISTORY:

The Machineries of Empire trilogy is set against a universe that depends on the psycho-social construct of "consensus reality", taken to the extreme, wherein that which the majority agrees upon/believes in is reality for all. The form that this reality takes is an interstellar empire with a heavy command hierarchy, controlled by a doctrine set forth and maintained by a six-faction system ( the Hexarchate ) that enforces a calendrical system of ritual observances upon those that it governs.

In the universe of the trilogy, a "calendar" is a society-wide mathematical and psychological engine capable of altering reality, provided that all of the empire's inhabitants follow it with near-fanatical levels of faith. It's not the properties of real-life math that drive the society, buy the imagery and the meaning given to the math, as set forth by the doctrine. The political, social and physical power of the empire - as well as the "exotic" ( pseudo-magical ) force that the various factions are able to wield are dependent on mass-believe in this dogma and deviations from imperial standard are considered dangerous and heretical. The most extreme forms of heresy ( alternative factions, rebellions and alternate calendars, for example ) are met with military repression and "re-education" - essentially indoctrination, in the form of imprisonment, torture and actual psychological surgery to alter and "correct' personalities.

To have any career within the government, an individual must join up with a faction. The factions are often encouraged to spit in one another's eye. The important ones for Cheris's history section are the Nirai ( engineers, doctors and scientists ), the Shuos ( spies and information officers ) and the Kel ( soldiers and officers ).

NINEFOX GAMBIT

Captain Kel Cheris uses a quasi-heretical formation in her efforts to stamp out a heretical rebellion and finds her current company broken up for doctrinal re-education as the result of her actions. Due to her mathematical skills, her commanding officers offer her a chance to propose a method for retaking a nexus fortress called "the Fortress of Scattered Needles" that has come under hostile takeover by more heretics. Given this chance, she comes to the conclusion that her best chance for retaking a fortress said to be unconquerable relies on the tactical genius of the Hexarchate's greatest mass-murdering traitor: General Shuos Jedao. She proposes reviving him from his eternal imprisonment and is given the mission, excused from re-education and sets off to retake the Fortress of Scattered Needles after being anchored to Jedao's ghost. This results in her being psychically/psychologically spliced with him, allowing them to communicate as well as changing her shadow and reflection into his.

Together, Cheris and Jedao assemble their army ( referred to as a "swarm", in-universe) and break the fortress's legendary "unbreakable" shields in order to launch infantry alongside psychological and technological assaults on the heretics holding the fortress. They eventually hatch a plan to use the swarm's servitors (sentient robots), who are unaffected by the warping of reality, to enter the fortress through propaganda machines to begin their counterattack on the heretics.

CRAU BREAK: AGOGE

Just after Cheris has requested the aid of the servitors in assaulting the Shattered Needles, she finds herself suddenly and irrevocably in the middle of a war zone as an infantry soldier. Within COST, the organization in charge of fighting an oppressive empire called the Regency, she assists in numerous espionage and combat-related battles to preserve or change timelines that would prevent the eventual rise of the Regency itself. She serves in Australia at the tail end of World War I, dutifully defending ANZAC soldiers during the Gallipoli campaign and subsequently finds herself involved in a long-term mission on the alien planet of Jhachsh in 372nd year of Queen Thsh's reign to ensure that COST would not lose access to a resource that they needed to fuel their technologies. It is a diplomatic mission that she excels at, fostering relations between the military arm of the regime and COST and ultimately preserving the Queen's rule. Following the civil war that ensued, Cheris and Jedao found themselves back in their original place, with no time having passed between when they left their own war and when they arrived once more.

RETURN TO NINEFOX GAMBIT

Eventually, their success in restoring the Hexarchate's control of the fortress, albeit at massive cost of life, is reported; their combined tactics, unconventional and heretical triggers a hostile reaction by the paranoid hivemind that is the Kel's central Command. This results in the mass slaughter of Cheris's swarm and troops; Jedao's ghost is killed in the process, psychically shielding her from the worst of the damage. His death and the betrayal force Cheris to choose between her duty as Kel ( to "spend her life's coin" at Command's behest ) and to uphold Jedao's centuries-long con. She picks Jedao, consumes his memories and becomes less and less of "herself" and more and more of "him". In the following novel, she plays on this by portraying Jedao perfectly and pretending she was the one who died. In-game, she will continue this trend by presenting herself as "Shuos Jedao" and guarding her identity as Ajewen Cheris.

PERSONALITY:

Though they were citizens of the empire, Cheris's family and people ( a minority group known as the Mwennin ) did not approve of the military, nor did they really approve of the Hexarchate. Cheris, wanting badly to belong to something greater than herself, turned her back on her family and customs and fled into the arms of the Kel. The Kel, trained and medically induced to find solace and pleasure in instinctual obedience ( known as "formation instinct" ), were the perfect sea in which she could submerse herself and find her place in the vast reaches of the empire.

Though her intelligence and mathematical skill lead to her being earmarked as a candidate for the Nirai, a faction of engineers, mathematicians and scientists, her personal yearnings and what her records indicate is that Cheris was always a woman with a strong sense of duty and conservatism. Those two traits allowed her to excel in the name of the empire she was loyal to. In her waking moments, both naturally and due to formation instinct, she considered herself an extension of the Hexarchy first and foremost, and an individual secondarily. When she reflects on her company's presence during the assault on heretical forces on the planet of Dredge, she also mentions how she feels the battlefield is her home.

Her love and exceptional talent for mathematics allows her to calculate and control integers and formula with blazing speed, highlighting her attentiveness and skill with calendrical systems, even when those systems deviate from imperial standard. It also allows her to save the lives of people she deeply cares for and feels responsible towards - when her company is disbanded at the beginning of Ninefox Gambit, she asks for their names and dates of service, committing them to memory and heart so that they all can take comfort in their memories of being Kel, and being part of a whole (essentially a hivemind) for at least a while. While attentiveness may have been be a strength of hers, she was not originally a gamemaster, given more to moments of "Kel stocism" and "Kel literalism", as the sayings go. When told to “circle six times and kick the door down” to find her quarters, she literally kicks the door down -- both because it is what she has been told to do (instinctive acceptance and solace in command) and because she is not at all a mindless drone. She takes pleasure in being literal, and finds humor in it.

Once she has consumed Jedao's ghostly corpse, she is able to adopt the mantle of Shuos gamemaster, utilizing his centuries-worth of training and skill in espionage, information gathering and mindgames. Outside of her military service and the psychological marks it’s left on her person, Cheris’s empire-given profile indicates she’s given to personal past-times such as dramas and romantic comedies, and that she pursues hobbies such as dueling with enthusiasm. Despite the hierarchical rank-and-file of society, she has a wry manner of speaking to others and referring to her society, especially in regards to other factions. Since childhood, she’s also been a polite, warm friend to servitors -- a race of recently-awakened sentient robots with their own social hierarchy. She mourns the servitors that perish on Dredge by observing their fallen status with wire flowers in her personal quarters, placing them on the same level as her soldiers. This supports that Cheris is a woman who values lives. She values and lives by the numbers, which - in her society - are likely as to her as our concept of souls would be to some.

In living by the numbers, she inevitably becomes shackled to General Shuos Jedao. To that end, I describe Jedao's personality separately, but make note of the fact that - at this point - they are essentially a singular, inseparable entity ( "Cherdao" ). She has consumed his personality and can "play" him as though she is him. While he is considered to be the individual "in control" at the time of application and for in-game plot purposes, he is not. In contrast to Cheris, Jedao likes to teach. Like Cheris, he was earmarked for a faction due to his innate brilliance and inducted into Shuos school. While he had dreams of becoming an instructor, every time he tried to leave the empire's service, they found a way to drag him back in and drown him in paranoia, espionage and assassination. What makes his passion for instruction unfortunate is that he’s cagey and callous in his mentoring, due both to professional paranoia and because he is an utterly unstable genius.

Like Cheris, Jedao is a people-person, but in more ways than just social skills; in any given situation, Jedao focuses on the people and not the things. When called upon to break the Fortress's shields of "unbreakable" ice, he "guesses" ( read: deduces based on his ability to cold read a room full of people ) that the human operator that keeps the shields up is the pressure point he needs to brutalize into submission, not the shields themselves. He is a sentimental, frighteningly moral-minded mass-murderer with a deeply unsettling desire to end his own life. He calmly and all-too-rationally embraces what he's done ( he comments that his aide, should she have wanted to stop him - could have easily shot him through another officer; she didn't, but he shot her in exactly that way ) because it is a means to his ends. The Shuos, especially Jedao, are fond of games involving the hearts of the people and how that affects the mind, and have been referred to as "cheery sociopaths" as they perform their duties as intelligence officers in the Hexarchate.

CRAU: Cheris, who during her time with COST served only as General Jedao's anchor, worked alongside the General and her COST affiliates mainly to preserve institutions, making a name for herself as a powerful duelist among a predatory and powerful alien species that thought of her as anathema. She was focused on ensuring the lives of COST were preserved as is her wont, juggling her own strength and Jedao's mind in situations that required both combat capabilities and espionage. While at the time she did not intend to replace the current leadership with another, citing that they should not rebel against a long-time ally as such an act was heretical ( she also saw the Regency, the force in opposition of COST, as a heretical form of the Hexarchate - despite that the two performed many of the same functions ) and she was able to prove herself capable enough to impress the Queen herself, earning an audience with her and the military head of the Queen's entourage as well -- under her own established prowess, granting her a measure of pride and experience in her own right.

SPECIES: Human ( Futuristic, naturally capable of living long, long lives ).
APPEARANCE: Here.
SKILLS:

COMBAT CAPABILITIES ;
✦ Highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat and attentive to her surroundings; trained in military combat styles.
✦ Capable of using exotic ( "magic" ) and invariant ( "ye olde school" ) weaponry, such as swords and guns. Known as a nigh-unbeatable duelist.
✦ Pinpoint accuracy allows her to shoot the edge of a blade to knock the weapon out of someone's hand.
✦ Her reflexes precede her conscious thought, allowing her reaction time to preternaturally outstrip that of a normal person's.
✦ Initial education was at an infantry captain's level in military strategy/tactics pertaining to ground forces and spacecraft; she has since assimilated tactical knowledge from a genius-level tactician who was renowned for never losing a battle in 45 years in life OR in ~400 years since time of death.
✦ Specialist in kinetic operations and formations ( geometric battlefield rituals used to generate exotic effects such as weapons and shields, or to manipulate factors such as the power, quantity, direction or impact of a targeted force or structure ).

SOCIAL & INTELLECTUAL CAPABILITIES ;
✦ Formerly earmarked by top mathematicians for her incredible math skills ( she operates at the level of a STEM genius, basically ).
✦ Capable of exceptionally precise and quick cold and deep reads of a person ( their personality, psyche and psychoemotional state ) based on body language, vocal tone, word choice, microexpressions, etc.
✦ Speaks multiple languages, both audioverbal and audiovisual.
✦ Assimilated the knowledge of a multipurpose intelligence operative/spy/saboteur/hacker/assassin that has actively honed skills pertaining to such for ~400 years.
✦ Very good at befriending sentient tech!!!!!!!

OTHER STUFF ;
✦ Anyone who is possessed or undead can see her reflection as Jedao's, rather than her own. Just a fun thing, in case that counts.

Since the use of exotic weaponry and traditional formations requires a connection to the high calendar, I would assume she cannot use such things in-game. Player plot could maybe include the eventual creation of a heretical calendar using the game's own observances, etc. -- currently nerfed, naturally!

NEW POWER: Physical Mimicry. At first, she will only be able to adopt the physical movements of a single individual ( ie. the fighting technique of another of the Displaced ) and will have to "reset" herself through regimented meditation, etc. before she can learn the physical movements of another. She is limited in that she cannot copy their powers, only what the physical body can achieve and largely by what her body can achieve at this time.

POWER REASONING: She is able to flawlessly/seamlessly adopt the physical movements, accent and speech patterning of Shuos Jedao ( whom she may or may not be, it's very complex! ) and fool an entire warship full of Kel soldiers into believing it. She is highly analytical and the training that Shuos Jedao has relates to studying body language, among other physicality-related "games".

> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: here
SAMPLE TWO: here