Pradeda Application
Your Name: Mishi
Contact: Aim: ohsarjalim | Plurk: mishisings
LiveJournal: mishi_sings
Timezone: Eastern, or EDT or however you want me to format this
Do you have other characters in this game? none
Character
Name: Festina Ramos
Fandom: League of Peoples
Age: Not explicit, late twenties, early thirties. Gonna go with 31 if you need me to be specific
Physical description: See icons. Festina has dark brown hair, green eyes, a huge, roughly triangular purple birthmark on the right side of her face. She's short, but she's lean and strong and hasn't got an ounce of extraneous fat on her body. She is always well-groomed and impeccably dressed when not wearing her uniform. Despite her birthmark, she has more than once been called beautiful, though never to her face. Note that she still appears to be 25, thanks to an anti-aging treatment called Youthboost.
Background: Links to Wikipedia! Expendable | Vigilant | Hunted | Ascending | Radiant
What sets the universe of the League of Peoples apart from the others is a total commitment to non-violence. If you are sentient, you do not kill other sentient beings. If you kill a sentient being, you are non-sentient. And non-sentients are not allowed out of their home system. If they try, they simply drop dead the moment they cross into interstellar space. No one knows how this happens, but the higher-ups in the League are aliens with almost god-like powers. They don't give a shit if lesser species hurt, brainwash, enslave eachother, but they will not allow so much as a single solitary non-sentient being to travel the stars.
So, late into the 21st Century, aliens from the League of Peoples made first contact with humanity with a choice. "Join the League of Peoples. We'll give you a fresh, new, unpolluted duplicate of your homeworld to live on and the right to travel between the stars, provided you agree to this one simple rule: never kill sentient beings." This sounded like a pretty good deal, so four hundred years later, the human Technocracy spans hundreds of worlds all over the galaxy, and most people on these various worlds live in comfort and indolence. Youthboost has doubled humanity's life-expectancy, there's no war, little crime, and medicine can cure almost any illness or injury one might have, and in short, the government is required by the League of People's Law to prevent as much loss of life of its populace as it possibly can. But even in such societies, there still needs to be someone to take the risks.
Which brings me to the other thing that sets the League of Peoples books apart from other science fiction: because violent death is so rare, when it does happen it is devastating to those involved with the deceased. Especially detrimental to fleet morale were the deaths of popular, well-liked, and overall good-looking crew members. It therefore became the policy of the Technocracy's Outward Fleet to draft the ugliest sons of bitches into the part of the fleet in which death happened most often: the Explorer Corps. If you were ugly, deformed, or just plain weird, and yet not disabled in a way that would disqualify you from the Navy, there was an Explorer's black uniform in your future. After all, who cares if some freak dies on a hostile planet?
That's right: the heroes of these books are the equivalent of redshirts from Star Trek.
Point in Story: After the end of Radiant
Personality: All her life, Festina has been told that she's ugly. In a culture in which most all disfigurements and oddities can be corrected by medical science, this would certainly seem to be the case. But whether she is or not, the fact remains that her lurid port-wine birthmark determined her entire life. She was flagged from birth as a potential candidate for the Explorer corps. Her "ugliness" set her apart and isolated her from others as a child. She was pretty much drafted into attending Explorer Academy. And though she resents the awful policy which deprived her of the choice to determine her own destiny, she is an Explorer through and through and intensely proud of it, thank you. Festina has had certain behaviors programmed into her, like pride in her personal appearance, and when startled, she will automatically, reflexively do a backroll and come up in a fighting stance. Paranoia is her ground state of being. Any good military training fosters a sense of solidarity with your peers, and the Explorers are champions of solidarity, especially since no one else is on their side. The Admiralty uses Explorers as canon-fodder, so Festina learned that even superior officers couldn't be trusted, and her experiences as an Explorer and as the Navy's troubleshooter have only reinforced this. Over the course of her adventures she has uncovered the dirty dealings of two High Admirals and a conspiracy spanning millenia perpetrated by a trusted member-species of the League. Thus she mistrusts any answer that seems too pat, any mission that seems too easy, and refuses to take things at face value. She's usually right, too.
She has a real complex about her disfigurement, like most Explorers, finding it both a source of pride and shame. It marks her as an Explorer, and as a member of the only uniformly competent body of people in the Navy, but of course it also marks her as a freak to normal people. It's a central part of her identity - she found a temporary cure on Melaquin, but it made her feel acutely self-conscious when she joined the outpost of Explorers there. When she was offered the post of Lieutenant Admiral, she got rid of the cure as an act of solidarity with the Explorer Corps. One might imagine that, as an Explorer, Festina is bitter about the way she has been treated by regular people. This is so, but she doesn't let it affect the way she deals with people. She's polite and cordial with most people, unless they give her a reason not to be. Naturally, she's always happy to see a fellow Explorer, and insists on informality in those circumstances. (Explorers traditionally dislike acting authoritarian - while another Admiral might insist on being adressed as befitting his rank, Festina would rather just be called Festina.)
Despite this, she's a regular hero. She always seems to show up just when the shit hits the fan and save the day, but she considers it her job, and never really stays long enough for people to thank her. She feels compelled to struggle, because she believes anything else is too easy. She is brave and selfless, prepared to sacrifice herself for the sake of people she has barely met. She hasn't yet been confronted with this somewhat suicidal impulse, and it will probably greatly bother her when it is finally pointed out to her - Explorers are supposed to be programmed not to take their own lives, and Festina herself would contemptuously regard the suicide as taking the easy way out. Regardless of how heroic her impulse towards self-sacrifice is, she is also not above being ruthless, nor does she balk at killing non-sentients. She will hurt people for the sake of her mission, though she takes no pleasure in unnecessary pain.
The reason for all this goes back to the fact that she's been marginalized her entire life, told she was expendable. Festina aims to prove to the world that she, and by extension all other Explorers, are NOT Expendable, and she does this by being the best and the brightest and the bravest of what humanity has to offer.
Powers/Abilities:
-She is skilled in martial arts.
-Like all Explorers, she knows first aid and is trained in emergency surgery procedures.
-It is speculated that she might be the product of genetic engineering, because of her considerable strength and endurance, though these are both entirely within the range of regular humans, given a certain level of fitness.
-She majored in zoology, with a minor in geology at Explorer Academy.
Items you're bringing with you: A Bumbler, a stunner, and her grey admiral uniform.
-From Expendable on stunners: "Stunners were landing weapons, intended to stop alien animals without killing them. They fired an invisible cone of hypersonic white noise, intended to disrupt electroneural activity for two and a half seconds. [...] On a human, a single stunner blast caused about six hours of unconsciousness followed by a vicious bitch of a headache, but it did no true damage." Stunners run on rechargeable batteries. One charge is enough for 20 shots.
-From Expendable on Bumblers: "The Bumbler - officially our "Portable Wide Spectrum Amplification and Analysis Datascope", but only called that by quartermasters - was a handheld scanning device about the size and shape of a flat-topped coffee pot. It served two functions:
A. Its screen could be tuned to display any range of the electromagnetic spectrum in a visible form... handy if you wanted to check the neighborhood for the IR glow of warm-blooded fauna, or take an X-ray shot of some animal specimen's skeleton.
B. The machine was constantly analyzing incoming data for hints suggesting the approach of hostile lifeforms. The bumbler broadcast an alarm if it detected anything moving toward us. [...] I was not, however, overwhelmed with the Bumbler's acumen. [...] It took so long to do a risk analysis that sometimes the alarm went off after the first attack."
-From Expendable on admiral uniforms. "They're gray and they include slacks." Actually, I'm paraphrasing here, this is the most anyone has ever cared to elaborate about her uniform. Or Explorer uniforms, for that matter. Each branch of the service is colour-coded, but the important colours to remember for Festina are grey and black, black being the colour of the Explorer corps. My headcanon is her uniform looks a lot like Captain Kirk's from Star Trek, only grey with black braiding rather than gold with gold braiding.
Samples
First Person POV (Network Post):[audio] [She sighs in a beleaguered manner, as if being shunted into another dimension was something that happened to her all the time, and she doesn't like it one bit.] Right. This is Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. If there are any other Explorers out here, please respond. In the words of the senile old windbag who happened to be my predecessor, we might be able to get our asses out of here if we work together and don't fuck up. Anyone?
[A five minute pause, then another sigh.] I'm fucking sick of being marooned, and what's worse this stinks of advanced League meddling. I'm also fucking sick of being used as a pawn for advanced intelligences who have nothing better to do than stick their noses in the affairs of lesser beings. I hope the rest of the Explorer Corps is well clear of this, because if it isn't I'm gonna punch someone in the olfactory sensors. But I'll help. It just wouldn't be sentient of me if I didn't, now would it?
Third Person POV (Log Post): This was a sample post I wrote for Ilpromenade.
Before her stood a clear glass dome, about two hundred meters in circumference. As Festina entered the dome, the outside became murky, as if it had suddenly been submerged in a lake. Inside were about a dozen buildings, high Moorish towers in the center where the ceiling allowed more space, short, blocky buildings near the edges, all arranged around a central plaza containing two fountains. Everything was made of glass. All the villages on Melaquin had looked more or less like this. There was no way there could be one smack in the middle of Promenade, could there?
This particular village looked familiar, though. It looked exactly like Oar's hometown. How would she verify that, though? She considered going to the Tower of Ancestors and asking for Oar's mother - but the people of Melaquin all look alike to her, and the ones in the Tower of Ancestors would all have Tired Brains and would be unlikely to help. And she didn't want to test whether radiation in Promenade was more or less potent than it would be in the real world. Probably more, she reasoned, given the human tendency to exaggerate dangers. Festina decided instead to ask the AI in charge of the machines in the village. Tobit's town had had one, so perhaps Oar's had one too.
Before she found the AI, however, she found Jelca's old building. It was exactly as she had left it. Circuit boards, coils of wire, stripped insulation and all the junk Jelca left behind after he had built the food processors he took with him to the Explorer Enclave. Festina wondered now if that was all he had built. She'd first come here scant hours after killing Yarrun and burying Chee. Whatever Jelca had done to hurt Oar, she had wanted to believe it was all a misunderstanding, and she certainly didn't suspect he'd gone completely, insanely non-sentient. Did he tinker with his stunner to make it even more powerful? Did he build a more sinister weapon? Festina dismissed that idea as stupid. He hadn't really snapped until she and Oar showed up. And he had plenty of time to soup up his stunner before he even landed Melaquin. Festina wasn't tech-savvy enough to recognize any signs that Jelca had enhanced his stunner among the mess, but it was a moot point.
Aside from the prototype food-processors which had been too heavy for anyone to take with them, there was only one other working machine in the room - a television set, made of clear glass like everything else in the village, but broadcasting the same message on a loop, every fifteen minutes. The same two Explorers, sending a message to their compatriots stranded all over Melaquin, telling them to gather, put their heads together so that they could escape the planet. Those two Explorers had succeeded in escaping their exile, had tried to expose the High Council's use of Melaquin as a dumping ground for embarrassments.
They had been promoted to admirals in exchange for their silence, Chee and Seele. But they were Festina's predecessors. She was carrying on their work as the troubleshooters for the Technocracy and the Outward Fleet. She had stopped a plague, ended a brutal civil war, uncovered a conspiracy thousands of years old, but now she was back to square one. Stuck in Promenade, where she had no rank, or connections, only her wits and a bumbler, and a stunner which was down to its last five shots. Marooned more surely here than she had ever been on Melaquin, or Troyen, or Muta. She didn't care about the rank and the connections - as far as she was concerned those were only good in so far as they helped her to do her job. But being marooned? That pissed her off.
So did this impossible bubble, reminding her of things she hadn't really dwelled on in years. This was supposed to be her Place of Solace? This place, where she had spent three grief-sick days overcome with the stress of having killed her best friend and watched another man die and being betrayed by an organization which had already ruined her for any other career than that of Explorer? Those definitely hadn't been her most heroic moments. There was simply no point in dwelling on it when it was so pointless and painful. Jelca, Chee, and Yarrun were long dead, the Technocracy could no longer get away with stranding people on Melaquin, and this wasn't even Oar's real hometown. Just a cheap copy made to mess with Festina.
Contact: Aim: ohsarjalim | Plurk: mishisings
LiveJournal: mishi_sings
Timezone: Eastern, or EDT or however you want me to format this
Do you have other characters in this game? none
Character
Name: Festina Ramos
Fandom: League of Peoples
Age: Not explicit, late twenties, early thirties. Gonna go with 31 if you need me to be specific
Physical description: See icons. Festina has dark brown hair, green eyes, a huge, roughly triangular purple birthmark on the right side of her face. She's short, but she's lean and strong and hasn't got an ounce of extraneous fat on her body. She is always well-groomed and impeccably dressed when not wearing her uniform. Despite her birthmark, she has more than once been called beautiful, though never to her face. Note that she still appears to be 25, thanks to an anti-aging treatment called Youthboost.
Background: Links to Wikipedia! Expendable | Vigilant | Hunted | Ascending | Radiant
What sets the universe of the League of Peoples apart from the others is a total commitment to non-violence. If you are sentient, you do not kill other sentient beings. If you kill a sentient being, you are non-sentient. And non-sentients are not allowed out of their home system. If they try, they simply drop dead the moment they cross into interstellar space. No one knows how this happens, but the higher-ups in the League are aliens with almost god-like powers. They don't give a shit if lesser species hurt, brainwash, enslave eachother, but they will not allow so much as a single solitary non-sentient being to travel the stars.
So, late into the 21st Century, aliens from the League of Peoples made first contact with humanity with a choice. "Join the League of Peoples. We'll give you a fresh, new, unpolluted duplicate of your homeworld to live on and the right to travel between the stars, provided you agree to this one simple rule: never kill sentient beings." This sounded like a pretty good deal, so four hundred years later, the human Technocracy spans hundreds of worlds all over the galaxy, and most people on these various worlds live in comfort and indolence. Youthboost has doubled humanity's life-expectancy, there's no war, little crime, and medicine can cure almost any illness or injury one might have, and in short, the government is required by the League of People's Law to prevent as much loss of life of its populace as it possibly can. But even in such societies, there still needs to be someone to take the risks.
Which brings me to the other thing that sets the League of Peoples books apart from other science fiction: because violent death is so rare, when it does happen it is devastating to those involved with the deceased. Especially detrimental to fleet morale were the deaths of popular, well-liked, and overall good-looking crew members. It therefore became the policy of the Technocracy's Outward Fleet to draft the ugliest sons of bitches into the part of the fleet in which death happened most often: the Explorer Corps. If you were ugly, deformed, or just plain weird, and yet not disabled in a way that would disqualify you from the Navy, there was an Explorer's black uniform in your future. After all, who cares if some freak dies on a hostile planet?
That's right: the heroes of these books are the equivalent of redshirts from Star Trek.
Point in Story: After the end of Radiant
Personality: All her life, Festina has been told that she's ugly. In a culture in which most all disfigurements and oddities can be corrected by medical science, this would certainly seem to be the case. But whether she is or not, the fact remains that her lurid port-wine birthmark determined her entire life. She was flagged from birth as a potential candidate for the Explorer corps. Her "ugliness" set her apart and isolated her from others as a child. She was pretty much drafted into attending Explorer Academy. And though she resents the awful policy which deprived her of the choice to determine her own destiny, she is an Explorer through and through and intensely proud of it, thank you. Festina has had certain behaviors programmed into her, like pride in her personal appearance, and when startled, she will automatically, reflexively do a backroll and come up in a fighting stance. Paranoia is her ground state of being. Any good military training fosters a sense of solidarity with your peers, and the Explorers are champions of solidarity, especially since no one else is on their side. The Admiralty uses Explorers as canon-fodder, so Festina learned that even superior officers couldn't be trusted, and her experiences as an Explorer and as the Navy's troubleshooter have only reinforced this. Over the course of her adventures she has uncovered the dirty dealings of two High Admirals and a conspiracy spanning millenia perpetrated by a trusted member-species of the League. Thus she mistrusts any answer that seems too pat, any mission that seems too easy, and refuses to take things at face value. She's usually right, too.
She has a real complex about her disfigurement, like most Explorers, finding it both a source of pride and shame. It marks her as an Explorer, and as a member of the only uniformly competent body of people in the Navy, but of course it also marks her as a freak to normal people. It's a central part of her identity - she found a temporary cure on Melaquin, but it made her feel acutely self-conscious when she joined the outpost of Explorers there. When she was offered the post of Lieutenant Admiral, she got rid of the cure as an act of solidarity with the Explorer Corps. One might imagine that, as an Explorer, Festina is bitter about the way she has been treated by regular people. This is so, but she doesn't let it affect the way she deals with people. She's polite and cordial with most people, unless they give her a reason not to be. Naturally, she's always happy to see a fellow Explorer, and insists on informality in those circumstances. (Explorers traditionally dislike acting authoritarian - while another Admiral might insist on being adressed as befitting his rank, Festina would rather just be called Festina.)
Despite this, she's a regular hero. She always seems to show up just when the shit hits the fan and save the day, but she considers it her job, and never really stays long enough for people to thank her. She feels compelled to struggle, because she believes anything else is too easy. She is brave and selfless, prepared to sacrifice herself for the sake of people she has barely met. She hasn't yet been confronted with this somewhat suicidal impulse, and it will probably greatly bother her when it is finally pointed out to her - Explorers are supposed to be programmed not to take their own lives, and Festina herself would contemptuously regard the suicide as taking the easy way out. Regardless of how heroic her impulse towards self-sacrifice is, she is also not above being ruthless, nor does she balk at killing non-sentients. She will hurt people for the sake of her mission, though she takes no pleasure in unnecessary pain.
The reason for all this goes back to the fact that she's been marginalized her entire life, told she was expendable. Festina aims to prove to the world that she, and by extension all other Explorers, are NOT Expendable, and she does this by being the best and the brightest and the bravest of what humanity has to offer.
Powers/Abilities:
-She is skilled in martial arts.
-Like all Explorers, she knows first aid and is trained in emergency surgery procedures.
-It is speculated that she might be the product of genetic engineering, because of her considerable strength and endurance, though these are both entirely within the range of regular humans, given a certain level of fitness.
-She majored in zoology, with a minor in geology at Explorer Academy.
Items you're bringing with you: A Bumbler, a stunner, and her grey admiral uniform.
-From Expendable on stunners: "Stunners were landing weapons, intended to stop alien animals without killing them. They fired an invisible cone of hypersonic white noise, intended to disrupt electroneural activity for two and a half seconds. [...] On a human, a single stunner blast caused about six hours of unconsciousness followed by a vicious bitch of a headache, but it did no true damage." Stunners run on rechargeable batteries. One charge is enough for 20 shots.
-From Expendable on Bumblers: "The Bumbler - officially our "Portable Wide Spectrum Amplification and Analysis Datascope", but only called that by quartermasters - was a handheld scanning device about the size and shape of a flat-topped coffee pot. It served two functions:
A. Its screen could be tuned to display any range of the electromagnetic spectrum in a visible form... handy if you wanted to check the neighborhood for the IR glow of warm-blooded fauna, or take an X-ray shot of some animal specimen's skeleton.
B. The machine was constantly analyzing incoming data for hints suggesting the approach of hostile lifeforms. The bumbler broadcast an alarm if it detected anything moving toward us. [...] I was not, however, overwhelmed with the Bumbler's acumen. [...] It took so long to do a risk analysis that sometimes the alarm went off after the first attack."
-From Expendable on admiral uniforms. "They're gray and they include slacks." Actually, I'm paraphrasing here, this is the most anyone has ever cared to elaborate about her uniform. Or Explorer uniforms, for that matter. Each branch of the service is colour-coded, but the important colours to remember for Festina are grey and black, black being the colour of the Explorer corps. My headcanon is her uniform looks a lot like Captain Kirk's from Star Trek, only grey with black braiding rather than gold with gold braiding.
Samples
First Person POV (Network Post):[audio] [She sighs in a beleaguered manner, as if being shunted into another dimension was something that happened to her all the time, and she doesn't like it one bit.] Right. This is Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. If there are any other Explorers out here, please respond. In the words of the senile old windbag who happened to be my predecessor, we might be able to get our asses out of here if we work together and don't fuck up. Anyone?
[A five minute pause, then another sigh.] I'm fucking sick of being marooned, and what's worse this stinks of advanced League meddling. I'm also fucking sick of being used as a pawn for advanced intelligences who have nothing better to do than stick their noses in the affairs of lesser beings. I hope the rest of the Explorer Corps is well clear of this, because if it isn't I'm gonna punch someone in the olfactory sensors. But I'll help. It just wouldn't be sentient of me if I didn't, now would it?
Third Person POV (Log Post): This was a sample post I wrote for Ilpromenade.
Before her stood a clear glass dome, about two hundred meters in circumference. As Festina entered the dome, the outside became murky, as if it had suddenly been submerged in a lake. Inside were about a dozen buildings, high Moorish towers in the center where the ceiling allowed more space, short, blocky buildings near the edges, all arranged around a central plaza containing two fountains. Everything was made of glass. All the villages on Melaquin had looked more or less like this. There was no way there could be one smack in the middle of Promenade, could there?
This particular village looked familiar, though. It looked exactly like Oar's hometown. How would she verify that, though? She considered going to the Tower of Ancestors and asking for Oar's mother - but the people of Melaquin all look alike to her, and the ones in the Tower of Ancestors would all have Tired Brains and would be unlikely to help. And she didn't want to test whether radiation in Promenade was more or less potent than it would be in the real world. Probably more, she reasoned, given the human tendency to exaggerate dangers. Festina decided instead to ask the AI in charge of the machines in the village. Tobit's town had had one, so perhaps Oar's had one too.
Before she found the AI, however, she found Jelca's old building. It was exactly as she had left it. Circuit boards, coils of wire, stripped insulation and all the junk Jelca left behind after he had built the food processors he took with him to the Explorer Enclave. Festina wondered now if that was all he had built. She'd first come here scant hours after killing Yarrun and burying Chee. Whatever Jelca had done to hurt Oar, she had wanted to believe it was all a misunderstanding, and she certainly didn't suspect he'd gone completely, insanely non-sentient. Did he tinker with his stunner to make it even more powerful? Did he build a more sinister weapon? Festina dismissed that idea as stupid. He hadn't really snapped until she and Oar showed up. And he had plenty of time to soup up his stunner before he even landed Melaquin. Festina wasn't tech-savvy enough to recognize any signs that Jelca had enhanced his stunner among the mess, but it was a moot point.
Aside from the prototype food-processors which had been too heavy for anyone to take with them, there was only one other working machine in the room - a television set, made of clear glass like everything else in the village, but broadcasting the same message on a loop, every fifteen minutes. The same two Explorers, sending a message to their compatriots stranded all over Melaquin, telling them to gather, put their heads together so that they could escape the planet. Those two Explorers had succeeded in escaping their exile, had tried to expose the High Council's use of Melaquin as a dumping ground for embarrassments.
They had been promoted to admirals in exchange for their silence, Chee and Seele. But they were Festina's predecessors. She was carrying on their work as the troubleshooters for the Technocracy and the Outward Fleet. She had stopped a plague, ended a brutal civil war, uncovered a conspiracy thousands of years old, but now she was back to square one. Stuck in Promenade, where she had no rank, or connections, only her wits and a bumbler, and a stunner which was down to its last five shots. Marooned more surely here than she had ever been on Melaquin, or Troyen, or Muta. She didn't care about the rank and the connections - as far as she was concerned those were only good in so far as they helped her to do her job. But being marooned? That pissed her off.
So did this impossible bubble, reminding her of things she hadn't really dwelled on in years. This was supposed to be her Place of Solace? This place, where she had spent three grief-sick days overcome with the stress of having killed her best friend and watched another man die and being betrayed by an organization which had already ruined her for any other career than that of Explorer? Those definitely hadn't been her most heroic moments. There was simply no point in dwelling on it when it was so pointless and painful. Jelca, Chee, and Yarrun were long dead, the Technocracy could no longer get away with stranding people on Melaquin, and this wasn't even Oar's real hometown. Just a cheap copy made to mess with Festina.