Elu Ariehmu (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goodcopofnemesis) wrote2023-10-29 09:22 pm
goodcopofnemesis) wrote2023-10-29 09:22 pm
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User Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
Plurk: fiercebadrabbit
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Xiao Xingchen, Envy, Brooklyn
Character Name: Elu Ariehmu
Series: The Outside
Age: Apparently 19, actually 70ish
From When?: Elu has just plunged out of the sky mid-battle in what he believed to be a heroic last stand that might lead to redemption (someone told him to do it) just before the end of book 3.
Inmate Justification: Elu has passion but no conviction, and it’s only through the very great efforts of other, better people that he didn’t destroy the world that way. He became an angel because when he was five years old, angels saved his city, and when he held onto that wonder long enough to ascend at far too young an age, no one bothered to explain to him that he was operating on little kid logic. When the reality of being an angel turned out to be less righteousness and more a combination of paperwork, politics, and torture, he spent the next several decades feeling kinda bad. He’d tell people, if asked, that sure, he knew he wasn’t a good person, but he never acted on or really believed it. He did little nice things when it wouldn’t get him in trouble or make any difference, and over time, the wide-eyed believer became an empty-eyed functionary who’d whine a little bit when prisoners were psychologically broken and had their fingernails pulled out. Even when he betrayed his order to save his commanding officer, it was because he had a crush on said officer and liked his life more or less the way it was. He is the definition of the guilty bystander. Any good thing he ever did was a shallow impulse, and any stand he ever took, someone gave him instructions. He died being slightly helpful to the good guys at last. Because his friend (who sort of wanted to kill him, who was his friend in the sense that he did upkeep on her cybernetic implants at the behest of their shared superior) told him to. Gutless and sniveling to the last.
Arrival: He agreed, because dying is scary.
Abilities/Powers: Angels are a bit harder to damage than baseline humans and heal faster, but serious injuries will still drop them. Elu is shot through with weird technology, just as many nanobots as blood cells and more metal than flesh by volume. He’s a techie from a cyberpunk universe on top of being mostly machine. Cut off from his network, a lot of his tech simply doesn’t work, but he’s demonstrated the ability to kludge it back to functional. He’s lacking the medical bots that made most of his fun hobbies like elective self-neurosurgery possible and the advanced printers that more or less gave him whatever material goods (and repair parts) he wanted. Still present are huge memory-banks, so he can learn very fast (and potentially just store a bunch of raw data if he wants to take the time) and the implants that give angels a nasty little edge reading microexpressions, which can make him feel borderline psychic just from picking up emotional reactions. He is, fortunately, not very good at that in practice.
Inmate Information: Elu started out such a good boy. He ascended as soon as he was legally allowed, freezing himself in his immortal, mostly technological body at age nineteen, and then turned out to be crap at being an angel. Intelligent, but lacking the ruthlessness and dishonesty necessary to the position. He spent a few years in grunt work that bored him to tears before he was snapped up by a high ranking angel who saw all sorts of potential in an assistant who was motivated and intelligent but completely lacking in personal ambition.
Remove Akavi from the equation and Elu would be… Well, still dead, for mostly unrelated reasons, but mostly harmless. Because Akavi came with purpose. Elu didn’t ascend to crunch data; he ascended to make a difference in a scary universe, and as Akavi’s assistant he was always at the center of important, exciting things.
Akavi, as one of the goddess Nemesis’s most effective agents, dealt mainly in manipulation, torture, cover-ups, and all the other things that the goddess of getting her divine, metaphorical hands dirty was all about.
And he was very exciting, and Elu was an impressionable wisp with no backbone.
Elu was Akavi’s technician, errand boy, and designated good cop. He dealt with his infatuation by sighing a lot and carrying on meaningless flirtations with other people Akavi captivated, which he knew was a little sad but did work. And when prisoners fell into despair, he brought them breakfast, or a nice book to read, and suggested they could fix everything And he didn’t free them or give them a chance to contact their loved ones or help them understand what was happening or anything, but he was sure nice!
It was weird how they always ended up angrier with him than the guy pulling out their fingernails.
This fifty year stretch, during which Elu was pretty happy in a wistful, unreflective way, was interrupted by internal politics and oncoming disaster, for which Akavi took the fall. He would have been executed to save the angelic corps embarrassment and make sure everyone was happy with their scapegoat. And here, arguably, Elu took the first actual action of his life. It was to… rescue Akavi, the murderous manipulator who’d made him into a cute accessory and reduced countless lives to ruin.
Akavi immediately realized that Elu’s usefulness would end without something to anchor his flimsy loyalties, so he offered the romantic relationship Elu had obviously been pining after for decades. It was desultory and unpleasant for both of them, and even then, Elu only rebelled by occasionally sneaking off to talk to human friends, who he endangered with his very existence as an angel on the lam. But they were nice and it made him less lonely! Akavi was off getting horrific revenge all the time!
In the end, as the reign of the gods came to an end and deep betrayals were revealed to the world, Elu… continued to take Akavi’s orders up to almost the last. He knew he’d been lied to and wronged and serving the wrong side, but doing things was, like, hard? When a wronged friend told him to join in the final battle, he did it, but even that was just cooperation.
Path to Redemption: Elu needs to take responsibility, make actual decisions about his own life, and actually try to atone in ways that aren’t feeling sort of bad. Currently he’s frustrated, frightened, and angry, but even that left him just sort of dithering. His small acts of resistance were only ever to assuage his own sense of doing his best. He tried to be a good person and Nemesis was lying to everybody and so on.
Elu’s first reaction to the barge will be polite contempt. He’s used to FTL and roaming space in wild ships. This one just doesn’t seem very good. He’s from a distant future that’s mythologized the default earth of the majority of barge experiences as sort of laughably, pathetically sad, and all human culture predating the rise of the gods as an object lesson in patheticness. He will try and hide his nature for a while, until he realizes no one cares he’s an angel, but then he’ll just be more of an ass. Politely! Because people love it when you’re nice about being condescending.
He needs to be pushed and held accountable, whether it’s looking down his nose at losers who don’t have medical nanobots to solve their problems or, say, doing the necessary paperwork to cover up the strategic vaporization of a town. Because it was a bad town. A lost cause, anyway. He responds well to strong personalities, but may cause problems for some wardens by fawning and looking for approval in the way that’s served him so well for so many years. He’s not even playing politics (he can’t lie to save his life; he can barely obfuscate a little to save someone else’s life). He’s very sincerely got the spine of a jellyfish and no self esteem!
Also just don’t let him develop a crush on an authority figure. It’s a whole thing.
The good news is Elu was beginning on this path. Just barely beginning, but beginning. He didn’t do what Akavi told him a few times. Mostly because Akavi’s abuse escalated and he lost interest in placating Elu the old way, but still. He did go to help protect the planet he helped imperil, even if it was only because he was peer pressured. He expected to die! He’d already expected to die, but maybe that’s good for half credit. He’s ready to poke a few sore spots. But he’s still gonna whine the whole time.
History: When Elu was five, his home planet was attacked by the bad, evil gods, and defended by the stern but fair goddess of vengeance. The second he was of legal age, he signed up as an angel, submitting to massive surgical alterations reaching into the soul as well as the body, and proceeded to be an intern for a few years. He was not cut out to be an angel of Nemesis. But then he caught the eye of a high-ranking angel named Akavi who found him useful, and spent his next five immortal decades doing angel stuff.
Protecting divine secrets. Repressing human technological advancements. Fighting the bad gods. And always keeping the Outside out. The Outside was inimical to the orderly world the gods made, all chaos and ruin and destruction, and whenever it sneaked into reality, it had to be stamped out. Sadly, so did any infected mortals. So sad. And then you had to find out what caused it, usually heresy, and interrogate the mortals infected with heresy, and interrogations lead all sorts of interesting places…
Yeah, Elu was an evil inquisitor’s office assistant.
Things got dicey when Akavi was put on the trail of a heretic who seemed unusually adept at dealing with the Outside. This turned out to be a no-win situation where he’d been set up to take the fall, but it didn’t look that way until the very last moment. Elu just looked after the prisoner(s) and provided tech support with a few of Akavi’s other minions while all sorts of odd Outside incursions went on. He was a good and helpful assistant, please don’t ask about the rooms full of caged physics students driven mad by contact with the Outside, have to keep them locked up for their own safety. And Akavi’s convenience.
Akavi fucked up. Akavi was sentenced to death, because the more important people who’d told him to do the impossible didn’t want to sentence themselves to death. That’d be ridiculous.
And Elu saved him. He was only able to because a few of the heretics had already altered Akavi’s ship to be undetectable, and because Elu had the tech savvy to rip out the connections between the two of them and the rest of angelic kind before they got caught. He had an idea, misty and distant, that he and Akavi would just… go away somewhere, be happy together. His faith in Nemesis was shaken, but he never had any faith in Akavi, just nice dreams.
The manipulation and escalating mistreatment that followed disillusioned him quickly. Akavi did not want to disappear. Akavi wanted revenge against pretty much everyone, the heretics and the gods. He had Elu run support while he ran around planting the seeds of destruction, and Elu just… let him. Even then, cut off from everything, his life thrown away, he couldn’t make a decision. He tried to be nice to people! And he did his best!
Angels were not supposed to escape once they’d been marked for disposal, and Elu had to protect them from a few attempts at reclaiming the pair of criminals they’d become. This was a bit easier because of a major Outside incursion they hid inside, waiting out the time on a planet full of monsters and reality-bending horrors. Elu made some local friends! And then Akavi hit him and threatened them. And he still stayed.
Finally a former friend sent to collect them was caught by Akavi. Elu was ordered to disable her completely, make her an asset, something he could have done easily as she was much more cybernetically enhanced than most angels, and he’d designed most of her gear.
He only disabled her a little! Sadly, that might be the bravest action he ever took.
Later, Akavi’s nonsense lead to Elu having an angel of the evil gods to interrogate. (When Elu did interrogations, he used nanobots and drugs, totally nice and kind compared to the squishier, screamier kind Akavi did.)
Yeah, in a twist no one could have foreseen, the supposed enemies of the gods were just Nemesis running a false flag on herself.
And even that didn’t spur Elu to action. Moping. Betrayal. The uprooting of the five year old who’d seen himself saved by a goddess. But as much as he was sad, he just thought very hard about it.
In the end, the battle between gods, fake gods, humans, the Outside, and a few aliens (helpful guys!) was fought, and Akavi ran off to cause trouble. Elu and a few others rose into the sky to help decide the outcome. It didn’t go well. And even that was not Elu’s choice. He was only following someone else’s sharp suggestion.
Sample Network Entry: Network
Sample RP: Log
Special Notes: Elu and all other angels has been neurologically altered to not even perceive anything of an eldritch nature, which in his universe is infectious and primarily causes its symptoms through visual transmission. Anything of that nature just looks like a scary black smear to him.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitPlurk: fiercebadrabbit
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Xiao Xingchen, Envy, Brooklyn
Character Name: Elu Ariehmu
Series: The Outside
Age: Apparently 19, actually 70ish
From When?: Elu has just plunged out of the sky mid-battle in what he believed to be a heroic last stand that might lead to redemption (someone told him to do it) just before the end of book 3.
Inmate Justification: Elu has passion but no conviction, and it’s only through the very great efforts of other, better people that he didn’t destroy the world that way. He became an angel because when he was five years old, angels saved his city, and when he held onto that wonder long enough to ascend at far too young an age, no one bothered to explain to him that he was operating on little kid logic. When the reality of being an angel turned out to be less righteousness and more a combination of paperwork, politics, and torture, he spent the next several decades feeling kinda bad. He’d tell people, if asked, that sure, he knew he wasn’t a good person, but he never acted on or really believed it. He did little nice things when it wouldn’t get him in trouble or make any difference, and over time, the wide-eyed believer became an empty-eyed functionary who’d whine a little bit when prisoners were psychologically broken and had their fingernails pulled out. Even when he betrayed his order to save his commanding officer, it was because he had a crush on said officer and liked his life more or less the way it was. He is the definition of the guilty bystander. Any good thing he ever did was a shallow impulse, and any stand he ever took, someone gave him instructions. He died being slightly helpful to the good guys at last. Because his friend (who sort of wanted to kill him, who was his friend in the sense that he did upkeep on her cybernetic implants at the behest of their shared superior) told him to. Gutless and sniveling to the last.
Arrival: He agreed, because dying is scary.
Abilities/Powers: Angels are a bit harder to damage than baseline humans and heal faster, but serious injuries will still drop them. Elu is shot through with weird technology, just as many nanobots as blood cells and more metal than flesh by volume. He’s a techie from a cyberpunk universe on top of being mostly machine. Cut off from his network, a lot of his tech simply doesn’t work, but he’s demonstrated the ability to kludge it back to functional. He’s lacking the medical bots that made most of his fun hobbies like elective self-neurosurgery possible and the advanced printers that more or less gave him whatever material goods (and repair parts) he wanted. Still present are huge memory-banks, so he can learn very fast (and potentially just store a bunch of raw data if he wants to take the time) and the implants that give angels a nasty little edge reading microexpressions, which can make him feel borderline psychic just from picking up emotional reactions. He is, fortunately, not very good at that in practice.
Inmate Information: Elu started out such a good boy. He ascended as soon as he was legally allowed, freezing himself in his immortal, mostly technological body at age nineteen, and then turned out to be crap at being an angel. Intelligent, but lacking the ruthlessness and dishonesty necessary to the position. He spent a few years in grunt work that bored him to tears before he was snapped up by a high ranking angel who saw all sorts of potential in an assistant who was motivated and intelligent but completely lacking in personal ambition.
Remove Akavi from the equation and Elu would be… Well, still dead, for mostly unrelated reasons, but mostly harmless. Because Akavi came with purpose. Elu didn’t ascend to crunch data; he ascended to make a difference in a scary universe, and as Akavi’s assistant he was always at the center of important, exciting things.
Akavi, as one of the goddess Nemesis’s most effective agents, dealt mainly in manipulation, torture, cover-ups, and all the other things that the goddess of getting her divine, metaphorical hands dirty was all about.
And he was very exciting, and Elu was an impressionable wisp with no backbone.
Elu was Akavi’s technician, errand boy, and designated good cop. He dealt with his infatuation by sighing a lot and carrying on meaningless flirtations with other people Akavi captivated, which he knew was a little sad but did work. And when prisoners fell into despair, he brought them breakfast, or a nice book to read, and suggested they could fix everything And he didn’t free them or give them a chance to contact their loved ones or help them understand what was happening or anything, but he was sure nice!
It was weird how they always ended up angrier with him than the guy pulling out their fingernails.
This fifty year stretch, during which Elu was pretty happy in a wistful, unreflective way, was interrupted by internal politics and oncoming disaster, for which Akavi took the fall. He would have been executed to save the angelic corps embarrassment and make sure everyone was happy with their scapegoat. And here, arguably, Elu took the first actual action of his life. It was to… rescue Akavi, the murderous manipulator who’d made him into a cute accessory and reduced countless lives to ruin.
Akavi immediately realized that Elu’s usefulness would end without something to anchor his flimsy loyalties, so he offered the romantic relationship Elu had obviously been pining after for decades. It was desultory and unpleasant for both of them, and even then, Elu only rebelled by occasionally sneaking off to talk to human friends, who he endangered with his very existence as an angel on the lam. But they were nice and it made him less lonely! Akavi was off getting horrific revenge all the time!
In the end, as the reign of the gods came to an end and deep betrayals were revealed to the world, Elu… continued to take Akavi’s orders up to almost the last. He knew he’d been lied to and wronged and serving the wrong side, but doing things was, like, hard? When a wronged friend told him to join in the final battle, he did it, but even that was just cooperation.
Path to Redemption: Elu needs to take responsibility, make actual decisions about his own life, and actually try to atone in ways that aren’t feeling sort of bad. Currently he’s frustrated, frightened, and angry, but even that left him just sort of dithering. His small acts of resistance were only ever to assuage his own sense of doing his best. He tried to be a good person and Nemesis was lying to everybody and so on.
Elu’s first reaction to the barge will be polite contempt. He’s used to FTL and roaming space in wild ships. This one just doesn’t seem very good. He’s from a distant future that’s mythologized the default earth of the majority of barge experiences as sort of laughably, pathetically sad, and all human culture predating the rise of the gods as an object lesson in patheticness. He will try and hide his nature for a while, until he realizes no one cares he’s an angel, but then he’ll just be more of an ass. Politely! Because people love it when you’re nice about being condescending.
He needs to be pushed and held accountable, whether it’s looking down his nose at losers who don’t have medical nanobots to solve their problems or, say, doing the necessary paperwork to cover up the strategic vaporization of a town. Because it was a bad town. A lost cause, anyway. He responds well to strong personalities, but may cause problems for some wardens by fawning and looking for approval in the way that’s served him so well for so many years. He’s not even playing politics (he can’t lie to save his life; he can barely obfuscate a little to save someone else’s life). He’s very sincerely got the spine of a jellyfish and no self esteem!
Also just don’t let him develop a crush on an authority figure. It’s a whole thing.
The good news is Elu was beginning on this path. Just barely beginning, but beginning. He didn’t do what Akavi told him a few times. Mostly because Akavi’s abuse escalated and he lost interest in placating Elu the old way, but still. He did go to help protect the planet he helped imperil, even if it was only because he was peer pressured. He expected to die! He’d already expected to die, but maybe that’s good for half credit. He’s ready to poke a few sore spots. But he’s still gonna whine the whole time.
History: When Elu was five, his home planet was attacked by the bad, evil gods, and defended by the stern but fair goddess of vengeance. The second he was of legal age, he signed up as an angel, submitting to massive surgical alterations reaching into the soul as well as the body, and proceeded to be an intern for a few years. He was not cut out to be an angel of Nemesis. But then he caught the eye of a high-ranking angel named Akavi who found him useful, and spent his next five immortal decades doing angel stuff.
Protecting divine secrets. Repressing human technological advancements. Fighting the bad gods. And always keeping the Outside out. The Outside was inimical to the orderly world the gods made, all chaos and ruin and destruction, and whenever it sneaked into reality, it had to be stamped out. Sadly, so did any infected mortals. So sad. And then you had to find out what caused it, usually heresy, and interrogate the mortals infected with heresy, and interrogations lead all sorts of interesting places…
Yeah, Elu was an evil inquisitor’s office assistant.
Things got dicey when Akavi was put on the trail of a heretic who seemed unusually adept at dealing with the Outside. This turned out to be a no-win situation where he’d been set up to take the fall, but it didn’t look that way until the very last moment. Elu just looked after the prisoner(s) and provided tech support with a few of Akavi’s other minions while all sorts of odd Outside incursions went on. He was a good and helpful assistant, please don’t ask about the rooms full of caged physics students driven mad by contact with the Outside, have to keep them locked up for their own safety. And Akavi’s convenience.
Akavi fucked up. Akavi was sentenced to death, because the more important people who’d told him to do the impossible didn’t want to sentence themselves to death. That’d be ridiculous.
And Elu saved him. He was only able to because a few of the heretics had already altered Akavi’s ship to be undetectable, and because Elu had the tech savvy to rip out the connections between the two of them and the rest of angelic kind before they got caught. He had an idea, misty and distant, that he and Akavi would just… go away somewhere, be happy together. His faith in Nemesis was shaken, but he never had any faith in Akavi, just nice dreams.
The manipulation and escalating mistreatment that followed disillusioned him quickly. Akavi did not want to disappear. Akavi wanted revenge against pretty much everyone, the heretics and the gods. He had Elu run support while he ran around planting the seeds of destruction, and Elu just… let him. Even then, cut off from everything, his life thrown away, he couldn’t make a decision. He tried to be nice to people! And he did his best!
Angels were not supposed to escape once they’d been marked for disposal, and Elu had to protect them from a few attempts at reclaiming the pair of criminals they’d become. This was a bit easier because of a major Outside incursion they hid inside, waiting out the time on a planet full of monsters and reality-bending horrors. Elu made some local friends! And then Akavi hit him and threatened them. And he still stayed.
Finally a former friend sent to collect them was caught by Akavi. Elu was ordered to disable her completely, make her an asset, something he could have done easily as she was much more cybernetically enhanced than most angels, and he’d designed most of her gear.
He only disabled her a little! Sadly, that might be the bravest action he ever took.
Later, Akavi’s nonsense lead to Elu having an angel of the evil gods to interrogate. (When Elu did interrogations, he used nanobots and drugs, totally nice and kind compared to the squishier, screamier kind Akavi did.)
Yeah, in a twist no one could have foreseen, the supposed enemies of the gods were just Nemesis running a false flag on herself.
And even that didn’t spur Elu to action. Moping. Betrayal. The uprooting of the five year old who’d seen himself saved by a goddess. But as much as he was sad, he just thought very hard about it.
In the end, the battle between gods, fake gods, humans, the Outside, and a few aliens (helpful guys!) was fought, and Akavi ran off to cause trouble. Elu and a few others rose into the sky to help decide the outcome. It didn’t go well. And even that was not Elu’s choice. He was only following someone else’s sharp suggestion.
Sample Network Entry: Network
Sample RP: Log
Special Notes: Elu and all other angels has been neurologically altered to not even perceive anything of an eldritch nature, which in his universe is infectious and primarily causes its symptoms through visual transmission. Anything of that nature just looks like a scary black smear to him.