APPLICATION ( AGOGE ) --

[bivariant]

PLAYER
NAME: pax
CONTACT: forzare @ plork
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER: YEA!!!

CHARACTER
NAME: Kel Cheris ( born "Ajewen Cheris" )
CANON: Machineries of Empire
AGE: Late twenties ( ~28 ).

CANON POINT: Ninefox Gambit, end of Chapter Sixteen. Cheris has recognizes that the swarm's servitors (sentient robots, for lack of better term) are not "formation-neural", meaning that the math that fuels the universe's magic can be manipulated with their presence. To this end, she has delivered an address to them, requesting their assistance and she has been met with their support. She concludes that a lot of people are going to die because of her decision, and has been informed that such a thing will never get easier by the ghostly general and mass-murderer inside of her mind.

HISTORY:
The landscape against which the Machineries of Empire trilogy is set is one that depends upon the psycho-social construct of “consensus reality” taken to the extreme, wherein that which is agreed upon is reality.

The form that this reality takes is a interstellar empire with a heavy command hierarchy, controlled by the doctrine set forth by a hexarchy, a six-faction system that enforces a calendrical system of ritual observances upon those that it governs. In the universe of the Machineries of Empire, a “calendar” is a society-wide mental and mathematical 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 this society, but the imagery and meaning given to that math, as set forth by doctrine. The political, social and physical power of the empire, as well as the “exotic” ( magical ) force that the various factions are able to wield are dependent on mass-belief in this dogma, and deviations from imperial standard are considered dangerously heretical, and the most extreme forms of heresy are met with military repression and “re-education” ( indoctrination, as well as psychological surgery to alter and “correct” personalities ).

The Hexarchate’s government is divided into six factions, three high and three low. The Rahal are considered the de facto leaders of the government, specializing in policy, law and the welfare of the empire’s citizens. The Nirai are the empire’s engineers, doctors, scientists and collect the rare mathematicians born to the populace. The Andan are luxurious and talented overseers of culture, diplomacy and finance - they’re viewed with relative mistrust, as the empire is defensive of their calendrical system and thus rendered highly xenophobic. The Vidona enforce doctrine and are responsible for public education. The Shuos and the Kel make up the empire’s sword, with the Shuos serving as information officers and spies and the Kel as military force. To have any career within the government, one must join a faction, and those factions are encouraged to spit in one another's eye from time to time.

The series itself does not hold the reader’s hand and guide them through this universe. It drops the reader into the middle of a long-standing empire and expects them to conform, or sink under the weight of the painfully foreign idea that in conforming is power. Because deviations from imperial doctrine result in alternate forms of reality, “calendrical rot” is a critical matter that calls for military presence, and that is what happens to the Scattered Needles. The Scattered Needles is one of the empire’s fortresses tasked with projecting the high calendar through the empire, which renders the calendar stable; famed for its impenetrable defenses, the fortress is overtaken by a coalition of heretics, who’s actions threaten to poison the empire’s well.

To this end, several higher-ups in the Hexarchate submit candidates who they feel will be able to offer ideas to lay successful siege to the Scattered Needled and retake it before calendrical rot begins to truly wreak havoc on more neighboring worlds and star systems. Infantry Captain Kel Cheris is among these individuals. Cheris is a member of the Kel, the Hexarchate’s volunteer military branch prided for their conservativeness and adherence to calendrical doctrine. During a military push against radical heretics, Cheris is forced to adapt or die alongside those in her command, and elects to use unorthodox (thereby heretical) methods to ensure she does both the will of the Hexarchate and keeps her soldiers alive. In doing so, she is both disgraced from service and earmarked as a candidate to retake the Fortress of Scattered Needles.

Where the other candidates put forth strategy, armies and weapons, Cheris’s plan involves the use of a single man: Shuos Jedao, the empire’s best general and greatest traitor. Jedao is a historically infamous figure, a brilliant tactician with a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, and a madman who inexplicably lost his mind at Hellspin Fortress and single-handedly massacred over a million people - rebels and soldiers under his command alike. He was executed nearly 400 years prior to Cheris’s lifetime, and his “ghost” is kept in a pseudo-prison as a resource for the Hexarchate to revive and send forth like a bloodthirsty, quasi-undead hound.

Cheris’s plan to utilize Jedao is approved, and she is anchored mind-to-mind with him so that they may lay siege to the Fortress of Scattered Needles for the good of the Hexarchate. She proceeds to work alongside Jedao in planning for the siege, despite that Command is withholding important information from her, by assuming that the Hexarchate wants her to succeed. Due to Jedao's presence, she is brevetted to the rank of general and given command of a swarm -- a military battalion that the two of them more or less hand-select.

Together, they make their way through space to the Scattered Needles, where they lay siege to the heretics by way of calendrical warfare -- a mathematical and dogmatic brawl between two welterweight realities, basically. Cheris's mathematical skills allow her to comprehend the manner in which the Fortress defends and Jedao "excels at people", allowing him to convey to her a way in which to use both military might and psychological viciousness to functionally punch a hole in the fortresses “impenetrable” defenses and establish a ground force. They are unable to push further until Cheris discovers that, due to the heretical calendar in place on board the fortress, swarm servitors (a collective of sentient robots, in essence) are no longer formation neutral. She deduces that this means that while the servitors can be harmed by the exotic properties of the heretics weapons, she can also use the servitors to disrupt the heretics exotics and also bolster her own military’s formations - a form of physical stances that the Kel specialize in, which allows them to generate exotic effects such as shields and lances.

To this end, she addresses the swarm’s servitors, requesting their assistance in the siege. They agree, and she has the majority of them deployed aboard the fortress - hidden away in propaganda drops - with the intention of utilizing them to construct military formations on a grand scale, thus taking the rebels by surprise. Her ultimate plan is to disrupt the heretic’s calendar by providing them with a victory worthy of celebration, which will push aside a ritual day and weaken the reality she is warring against, and to this end -- she absolves herself to provide the heretics with the most convincing victory, by offering up her own forces to the slaughter. It is at this point, just before this military push begins, that Cheris comes to COST, and begins to adapt.

PERSONALITY:
Cheris remembers the City of Ravens Feasting vividly; she thinks back to the [port town], and recalls the sound of feathers on the wind, of water lapping at the shoreline, of the scent of trade goods on the breeze in her most private moments. Though they were citizens of the empire, her family did not approve of the military, nor did they really approve of the Hexarchate itself, but Cheris wanted badly to belong to something greater than herself, and she turned her back on her family and fled into the arms of the Kel. The Kel, trained and medically induced to find solace and pleasure in instinctual obedience ( “formation instinct” ), were the perfect sea in which she could submerse herself and find her place in the vast reaches of a hierarchical, command-driven empire.

Though her intelligence and mathematical skills earmarked her as a candidate for the Nirai, a faction of engineers, mathematicians and scientists, her personal yearning and what her records precisely indicate is that Cheris was always a woman with a strong sense of duty and conservatism, and those two traits allowed her to excel in the name of the empire she is loyal to. In her waking moments, both naturally and due to formation instinct, she has 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 heretic forces on Dredge, she also mentions how she feels the battlefield is her home.

Despite her pleasure in serving the Kel, the people who look up to her as an infantry captain for guidance, and as one half of the Hexarchate’s sword-and-shield, Cheris shows early signs of being a “crashhawk” -- a form of independently-minded Kel soldier with a “defective” formation instinct. She’s able to resist the instinct on Dredge, adapting her approach (thus committing a form of heresy) in order to save her soldiers and gain a foothold on a dangerous battlefield that had already cost the Kel many lives. 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, 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.

In her world, certain individuals -- notably those who belong to factions -- project “signifiers”, visual psychological impressions that sometimes represent the individual’s psycho-emotional state or are indicative of their feats. Cheris’s personal signifier is referred to as “Ashhawk Sheathed Wings”, where an ashhawk is the animal emblem of the Kel, and “sheathed wings” indicates that she is an individual of great psychological stability. She demonstrates this in multiple instances, remaining level-headed in times of danger (ie. Dredge, as she runs calculations while reality is literally crumbling around her and her soldiers) and maintaining her composure, dignity and intellect when faced with the knowledge that she is disgraced -- her career she ran from her home to pursue, threatened.

She’s stable enough to be clever enough to play a Shuos game, though not clever enough to play the second game hidden within it, nor the third game hidden on a grander playing field 400 years in the making. Attentiveness may be a strength of hers, but she is not a gamemaster, and she is given to moments of “Kel stoicism” 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 a mindless drone. She takes pleasure in being literal, and finds humor in it.

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 duelling with enthusiasm, even if she is a mediocre swordswoman. 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. The numbers are all she has, after people have died.

And in living by the numbers, she inevitably becomes shackled to General Shuos Jedao, known historically for his million-person madman’s massacre nearly 400 years prior. Jedao is a revenant, a psycho-emotional ghost and imprint that cannot move outside of his prison without being anchored to a physical body -- and he is anchored to Cheris. As her direct superior, she is initially devoured by instinctual submission to him, something that he slowly begins to cause her to shed over time -- leaning in to that “crashhawk” potential she’s already shown. ( She was making demands of a general. She might have known this whole assignment was going to make her un-Kel. ) Because Jedao is always, always with her, he is the most influential presence in her life.

Jedao likes to teach. It’s unfortunate that he’s cagey and callous in his mentoring, due both to professional paranoia and because he’s barking mad. He’s a people-person, in more ways than just socializing; 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" ( deduces ) that the operator that keeps the shields up is the pressure point he needs to brutalize into submission, not the shields themselves. He and Cheris have complex conversations and interactions with one another, in which he seems to nurture her more "heretical" thoughts and actions, encouraging her to think freely and creatively, to put herself into other shoes, to grow and develop and, in a way, understand him.

He's a sentimental, alarmingly moral-minded murderer, in the end, as he calmly and all-too-rationally embraces what he's done ( he comments that his aide, should she wanted to stop him - could have easily shot him through another officer; she didn't, he did! ) because it is a means to his ends. And he uses his reputation, legacy and actions to push Cheris towards a goal disguised within a goal. At this time, she's unaware of what that goal is, but understands that the Shuos, especially Jedao, are fond of games involving the hearts of the people. She understands, in the end, that threats and force change minds. What she must do is change hearts, and it's with that in mind that she handles Jedao's plausible lies and convincing, potentially false anecdotes. What COST needs to primarily take away, is that Jedao is a very, very good resource. He is also considered an unstable influence on an otherwise stable woman - akin to a side personality gone kind mushy, and that while he cannot physically control Cheris, he is in his element at all times: the mind, where he and Cheris collide and communicate at all times.

POWERS:

CHERIS'S CAPABILITIES
→ Skilled in hand-to-hand combat and use of "invariant" weaponry ( swords, guns ).
→ Educated at an infantry captain's level in military strategy/tactics pertaining to ground forces and spacecraft.
→ 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 ).
→ Earmarked by the Hexarchate's top mathematician and creator of the current calendrical system for her mathematical skills ( she's a STEM genius, basically ). Math is magic, in her world.
→ Speaks multiple audioverbal languages, and one audiovisual language of note: Simplified Machine Universal.

JEDAO'S CAPABILITIES, which she has access to, either via physical bleedthrough or his advice.
→ Genius tactician who has never lost a battle in 45 years of life OR in roughly 400 years in death.
→ Trained as a multi-purpose intelligence operative/spy/saboteur/hacker/assassin and kept by the Hexarchate in a position where he could only expand and hone those skills. Ie. foreign languages, disguises, infiltration, etc.
→ Very good at cold reads/deep reads of a person's person and psyche based on body language, tone, etc.
→ Strong physical fighter, stronger and far more graceful than Cheris. Pinpoint accuracy that allow him to shoot the blade of a weapon out of someone's hand, and also hairtrigger reflexes built on being able to read someone -- his reflexes have been known to save his anchor's lives, as well as PRECEDE his conscious thought.
→ Glorified psychic shield against exotic ( magical ) damage and effects.
→ He can see and hear in 360 degrees, and also sees farther than a human does, in all directions at once.

DRAWBACKS
→ Her use of exotic weaponry and formations requires a connection to the high calendar, or a heretical calendar. A calendar requires mass belief in the same thing, accompanied by ritualistic observances ( feasts, public torture/execution, etc. ). Would the high calendar reach far enough across space/time to even hint at its presence while she's in COST?
→ Jedao's "bleedthrough", moments where his muscle memory ( or sometimes emotional state ) affects her. She sometimes lacks physical coordination, or adopts dialect/speech/gesture/expressions/mannerisms that are noticeably NOT hers. Jedao is also unstable and deeply suicidal, and she's been utterly lambasted and crippled by that before.
→ Formation instinct could be triggered, although difficult due to the structure of formation instinct needing someone superior in rank to her -- and she/Jedao are at a general's rank, while he provides a buffer from someone exacting absolute control.
→ Notably, Jedao's got dyscalculia, and Can't Do A Math without Cheris. 8(
→ I will include an opt in/out post for the body language reads!

SAMPLES
1ST PERSON: @ GEN!TEXTING
3RD PERSON: HANGING W/ HEI // W/ VAX // W/ PERCY

MISC:
Cheris’s shadow is visibly not shaped like her. It’s shaped like Jedao’s shadow, and it has nine eyes that like to move around in geometric patterns. Likewise, her reflection is Jedao as well. Enjoy that weirdness, COST!

PLANS:
I HERD U HAD ROBITS. She's going to befriend robits. And do math. And stop heretics 8)!!! Maybe see if she can MacGuyver her connection to the Hexarchate's calendar out of tin cans and string that spans the entire vast multiverse, as my long game, so that she can deeply regret it later on. That's gud shit right there.

ITEM:
The chrysalis gun given to her by Kel Command; it's a dull grey-green weapon capable of killing revenants - Jedao in particular, as she is under orders to eradicate him if he seems to be going mad or otherwise betraying her mission.

CHARACTER @ID SUGGESTIONS:
In order from most appreciated to least: @ voidset, @ sheathed, @ foxhawk and any derivations of the like!

HOW DID YOUR CHARACTER JOIN COST?

The data breach! The mere existence of the Regency is a direct threat to the Hexarchate, and she would rationally consider them dangerous heretics -- maybe even an extension of ( if not a greater threat than ) the crisis at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, and she ultimately would willingly work with COST ( by framing it as an act undertaken for the security of the Hexarchate ). For now...