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Character name: Dah Iawa
One-paragraph (100 words) summary of your character.
Iawa is dogmatically agnostic: "I don't know and you don't either." He applies this attitude to her gender as well as their religion and everything else in his life, although their pronouns don't normally fluctuate quite that many times per sentence. Iawa was born in the late heptarchate, and has Liozh heritage, an interest in philosophy, and a tendency to take things to extremes and get in over their head which led them, very temporarily, to the Vidona. This did not go well at all for them.
===
How did your character first learn of the hexarchate?
Iawa was born to a family of relatively wealthy civil servants and scholars, many of them Liozh. Their parents assumed that Iawa would be a scholar too, and encouraged their interest in philosophy. Iawa at this time was very confident, intolerant of what they would term intellectual cowardice. In their teens they fell into a strict utilitarian theoretical school, and decided that if torturing heretics was truly in the public interest then they should logically be willing to personally torture heretics. So, to their parents' horror, they signed up to join the Vidona.
Why did your character join this rebellion?
Iawa found Vidona training easy, although she couldn't relate to her classmates and had to simplify her complexities (gender included), or more unkindly, "dumb herself down for the greater good". She coped until the first remembrance she was expected to observe up close, at which point logic abruptly failed her.
Before the celebrants could shut her up, a rift opened. She has no idea how much time elapsed between then and now, but long enough to decide that she was wrong about everything, ever, and cannot trust her own judgment. Not long enough to acquire enough humility to trust anyone else's judgment.
What would make your character consider giving up the cause?
If he had reason to believe the group was ultimately doing more harm than good. He's already going to take some convincing that undoing a whole timeline isn't equivalent to killing all the people in it, and that the time travel group isn't causing the rifts themselves, and won't destroy the universe.
Apart from that, if torture is necessary in whatever society they're replacing the hexarchate with, or they need torture to power the time travel exotics, that would be a big problem for Iawa. (Nonfatal torture with volunteers might sway him, but he would be very worried.)
Name something your character does not want to lose.
She has a mirrorweight web piece (a polished and engraved stone small enough to fit in her palm) that she inherited from a grandparent. This isn't necessary for performing the self-scrying technique, it's more a focusing tool/memory aide, but it has great sentimental value.
Name something your character would die for.
To end the remembrances. If their death on its own could assure that, they would very enthusiastically volunteer. But given a less certain outcome and more time to weigh the probabilities, they have a bit more self-preservation.
Name something your character would kill for.
In cold blood, very little: killing is too irrevocable, and what if he's wrong? But in hot blood, given a weapon and faced with a person in the act of torturing another person, Iawa wouldn't hesitate to stop the torture by killing the perpetrator.
Who is your character's best friend?
They had a grandparent they loved a lot, Liozh Ton, who babysat for them as a child, a researcher into invariant technology who was very patient with Iawa and let them help with the research, respecting their intellect and treating them like an equal and a fellow researcher while never forgetting that they were a child in emotions and lived experience. Ton did a good job of taking Iawa just seriously enough, without taking them too seriously or laughing to their face.
Ton died after a short illness when Iawa was in their early teens.
Describe your character's perfect partner (romantic or friend or coworker, your choice).
Someone who would never have made the same mistake she did (joining the Vidona.) Iawa is therefore convinced that anyone she could love would necessarily hate her for having participated in that system.
What is your character's secret dream or desire, the one they've never told anyone?
Logically, if we are preventing people from being born then we are also preventing them from dying. So it would be hypocritical of Iawa to want to save her grandparent Ton, since (depending how far we go back in changing the timeline) Ton would not be dead, not to mention that this would be very unfair since what about all the other people who weren't saved? And Iawa hates hypocrisy and internal inconsistency worse than anything but torture. Nevertheless, that's her secret dream. To save, and submit herself to the judgment of, the one person who would understand.
How will your character die?
They'll get into a situation they overconfidently assume they can manage, discover they can't handle it after all, then panic and make it worse.
Alternatively, they will start talking and won't stop until someone kills them.
The situation with the Vidona was a bit of both.
Does your character have any powers that the hexarchate would consider "exotic" (magical)?
Iawa's grandparent taught him to use the Liozh mirrorweight self-scrying technique, and he can still use that. The results are often mixed and confusing, whether because he is technically not a member of the Liozh faction or because his inner state is mixed and confused.
What do you (the player) enjoy most in an RPG?
I don't have a lot of experience as a player. What I've enjoyed most as a spectator about RPGs of this sort is the unexpectedness, that they end up going in directions no one, even the individual players or GM, could have predicted. What might be a weakness in a less open-ended medium (incoherence or lack of direction) is instead a strength (richness and detail and surprise.)
===
You have 500 words to tell me anything else you want me and the other players to know about your character. Do it here.
Iawa is twenty years old, medium height, fat-ish, sedentary and physically untrained, and oscillates between gender presentations from day to day according to mood, but will rein this at need. During their studies with the Vidona, for example, everyone there assumed they were a woman, and they made no effort to correct this. The fluidity of their gender is not an instance of their internal confusion, although their attitude to their gender identity sometimes is.
Since what happened with the Vidona they believe that they were arrogant and overconfident and have learned their lesson, but are actually arrogant and overconfident about how humble and flexible they have become. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they have a huge weakness for people who are unimpressed by them but still like them.
They are book-smart at the humanities, skilled at oration and bluffing, and verbally very quick and good at spotting flaws in reasoning (except their own.) They have a small amount of technical skill with invariant technology, from helping Grandparent Ton with their research; otherwise their scientific/engineering/mathematical knowledge is poor. They are able-bodied, but have no training in running, lifting weights, or combat, and their hand-eye coordination is poor.
They are very idealistic but with minimal to no real world experience to back this up. They have a lot of high faction cultural capital to draw on at need. In a text-only medium, or with extensive body mods, they could successfully pass as an Andan to someone who's never met one, or to a Rahal even to someone who has (but not to an actual Rahal.) Despite their immersion in Vidona culture, they are not able to successfully impersonate a Vidona, and stood out like a sore thumb even when they were there, but they'd be able to spot who is or is not a Vidona. Their knowledge of the Kel and Shuos and Nirai, and of unaligned people outside their own social bubble is very limited.
If there were a faction called Well Actually, they would be its heptarch.
Their native language is the high language, and they've never learned any other languages. They are less well-educated and well-informed than they think, but their knowledge base isn't that bad overall considering that they're twenty years old and just spent three of those years with the Vidona.
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timeasmymeasure
Character App: Dah Iawa
Date: 2017-06-29 07:28 pm (UTC)Player name or handle: vass
RPG DW account (if separate): none
How can we get in touch with you? (email, DW messaging, other): Dreamwidth PM works for me
Character name: Dah Iawa
One-paragraph (100 words) summary of your character.
Iawa is dogmatically agnostic: "I don't know and you don't either." He applies this attitude to her gender as well as their religion and everything else in his life, although their pronouns don't normally fluctuate quite that many times per sentence. Iawa was born in the late heptarchate, and has Liozh heritage, an interest in philosophy, and a tendency to take things to extremes and get in over their head which led them, very temporarily, to the Vidona. This did not go well at all for them.
===
How did your character first learn of the hexarchate?
Iawa was born to a family of relatively wealthy civil servants and scholars, many of them Liozh. Their parents assumed that Iawa would be a scholar too, and encouraged their interest in philosophy. Iawa at this time was very confident, intolerant of what they would term intellectual cowardice. In their teens they fell into a strict utilitarian theoretical school, and decided that if torturing heretics was truly in the public interest then they should logically be willing to personally torture heretics. So, to their parents' horror, they signed up to join the Vidona.
Why did your character join this rebellion?
Iawa found Vidona training easy, although she couldn't relate to her classmates and had to simplify her complexities (gender included), or more unkindly, "dumb herself down for the greater good". She coped until the first remembrance she was expected to observe up close, at which point logic abruptly failed her.
Before the celebrants could shut her up, a rift opened. She has no idea how much time elapsed between then and now, but long enough to decide that she was wrong about everything, ever, and cannot trust her own judgment. Not long enough to acquire enough humility to trust anyone else's judgment.
What would make your character consider giving up the cause?
If he had reason to believe the group was ultimately doing more harm than good. He's already going to take some convincing that undoing a whole timeline isn't equivalent to killing all the people in it, and that the time travel group isn't causing the rifts themselves, and won't destroy the universe.
Apart from that, if torture is necessary in whatever society they're replacing the hexarchate with, or they need torture to power the time travel exotics, that would be a big problem for Iawa. (Nonfatal torture with volunteers might sway him, but he would be very worried.)
Name something your character does not want to lose.
She has a mirrorweight web piece (a polished and engraved stone small enough to fit in her palm) that she inherited from a grandparent. This isn't necessary for performing the self-scrying technique, it's more a focusing tool/memory aide, but it has great sentimental value.
Name something your character would die for.
To end the remembrances. If their death on its own could assure that, they would very enthusiastically volunteer. But given a less certain outcome and more time to weigh the probabilities, they have a bit more self-preservation.
Name something your character would kill for.
In cold blood, very little: killing is too irrevocable, and what if he's wrong? But in hot blood, given a weapon and faced with a person in the act of torturing another person, Iawa wouldn't hesitate to stop the torture by killing the perpetrator.
Who is your character's best friend?
They had a grandparent they loved a lot, Liozh Ton, who babysat for them as a child, a researcher into invariant technology who was very patient with Iawa and let them help with the research, respecting their intellect and treating them like an equal and a fellow researcher while never forgetting that they were a child in emotions and lived experience. Ton did a good job of taking Iawa just seriously enough, without taking them too seriously or laughing to their face.
Ton died after a short illness when Iawa was in their early teens.
Describe your character's perfect partner (romantic or friend or coworker, your choice).
Someone who would never have made the same mistake she did (joining the Vidona.) Iawa is therefore convinced that anyone she could love would necessarily hate her for having participated in that system.
What is your character's secret dream or desire, the one they've never told anyone?
Logically, if we are preventing people from being born then we are also preventing them from dying. So it would be hypocritical of Iawa to want to save her grandparent Ton, since (depending how far we go back in changing the timeline) Ton would not be dead, not to mention that this would be very unfair since what about all the other people who weren't saved? And Iawa hates hypocrisy and internal inconsistency worse than anything but torture. Nevertheless, that's her secret dream. To save, and submit herself to the judgment of, the one person who would understand.
How will your character die?
They'll get into a situation they overconfidently assume they can manage, discover they can't handle it after all, then panic and make it worse.
Alternatively, they will start talking and won't stop until someone kills them.
The situation with the Vidona was a bit of both.
Does your character have any powers that the hexarchate would consider "exotic" (magical)?
Iawa's grandparent taught him to use the Liozh mirrorweight self-scrying technique, and he can still use that. The results are often mixed and confusing, whether because he is technically not a member of the Liozh faction or because his inner state is mixed and confused.
What do you (the player) enjoy most in an RPG?
I don't have a lot of experience as a player. What I've enjoyed most as a spectator about RPGs of this sort is the unexpectedness, that they end up going in directions no one, even the individual players or GM, could have predicted. What might be a weakness in a less open-ended medium (incoherence or lack of direction) is instead a strength (richness and detail and surprise.)
===
You have 500 words to tell me anything else you want me and the other players to know about your character. Do it here.
Iawa is twenty years old, medium height, fat-ish, sedentary and physically untrained, and oscillates between gender presentations from day to day according to mood, but will rein this at need. During their studies with the Vidona, for example, everyone there assumed they were a woman, and they made no effort to correct this. The fluidity of their gender is not an instance of their internal confusion, although their attitude to their gender identity sometimes is.
Since what happened with the Vidona they believe that they were arrogant and overconfident and have learned their lesson, but are actually arrogant and overconfident about how humble and flexible they have become. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they have a huge weakness for people who are unimpressed by them but still like them.
They are book-smart at the humanities, skilled at oration and bluffing, and verbally very quick and good at spotting flaws in reasoning (except their own.) They have a small amount of technical skill with invariant technology, from helping Grandparent Ton with their research; otherwise their scientific/engineering/mathematical knowledge is poor. They are able-bodied, but have no training in running, lifting weights, or combat, and their hand-eye coordination is poor.
They are very idealistic but with minimal to no real world experience to back this up. They have a lot of high faction cultural capital to draw on at need. In a text-only medium, or with extensive body mods, they could successfully pass as an Andan to someone who's never met one, or to a Rahal even to someone who has (but not to an actual Rahal.) Despite their immersion in Vidona culture, they are not able to successfully impersonate a Vidona, and stood out like a sore thumb even when they were there, but they'd be able to spot who is or is not a Vidona. Their knowledge of the Kel and Shuos and Nirai, and of unaligned people outside their own social bubble is very limited.
If there were a faction called Well Actually, they would be its heptarch.
Their native language is the high language, and they've never learned any other languages. They are less well-educated and well-informed than they think, but their knowledge base isn't that bad overall considering that they're twenty years old and just spent three of those years with the Vidona.