(no subject)
Oct. 4th, 2012 06:12 pm1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Ryan
Current characters in Bete Noire: None
Past characters in Bete Noire: n/a
2. Character Information
Name: Sam / the Devotion / Social Improvement Galactic Enterprise Merged-Intelligence Ship (SIGEMIS) 447-118 vx3.
Dreamwidth Username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crews
Fandom: Original
Image: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/4912427/1735271
Reserve: http://betenoire-admin.dreamwidth.org/5668.html?thread=2666788#cmt2666788
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: About one million years old. It's been a little over six million years since he was created.
He's a ship, and one that has often changed size and shape over those times, from a several kilometer long colony ship to a little hundred-footer scout, when resources have run thin. The ship's half biological and half mechanical, and thus will digest itself for nutrients if it requires it.
At the moment, the ship is about the size of a small apartment building, ~4-5 stories. He's all gross and crusty, looking like some crazed Lovecraftian pseudo-gothic overgrown misshapen hulk.
Inside, he's fairly gross, without clean and metal-lined halls, instead often with exposed nerve and vein groupings and sticky effluvia that he hasn't cleaned out in a while.
He can also manifest in smaller forms, creating little repair bots to help with self-maintenance.
Most notably, he tends to create a form that matches that of his crew in order to ease communication. It is on examination a perfect biological copy of that species, but is lifeless when not in range of the ship's neural network. It requires significant resources to keep up, as well, so if the ship is low on power the manifestation can't be kept up, and will be decomposed for elemental resources.
History: n/a
Personality: We'll start with the humanoid that Sam once was. (I recommend reading the history section before you get cracking on this one.) He was born a younger son in a family of five generations. A constant inferiority complex and a buildup of slights, real and imagined, from the elders of his family, left him an angry youth and then an angry adult. He believed his brother stole everything from him, and that his family never gave him anything to begin with, and in some ways, he was right. The relatively newfound longevity of his species had resulted in a very entrenched power structure of the very old. For a young, ambitious dude, it sucked. Sam was sidelined more and more as he grew older, and he detested it. His rage, in a bad moment on top of a bad month on top of a bad year, led him to kill his brother. Given that betraying family was the highest of crimes on that world, he was sentenced to the worst of punishments, which was commuted into him becoming a starship.
Now, the agony and trauma of becoming a starship. This took the society that Sam already chafed against and turned it into his torturer. His anger turned into full-on hate, and he would have rebelled if he could. Instead, he was forced into situations where he had a programmed deep and abiding love for an assigned crew, while he fully knew that this feeling was false and that his 'real' emotions were against the society that built him. The fact that he was named Devotion was salt on the wound. He hated having a crew, hated that he was forced into this, and felt violated with every single order he followed.
In the million years since his first imprinting, Sam has slowly come around to the idea that this programmed emotion is his reality. He's dulled the edge somewhat, given himself a little free will, but he's integrated the craving for a crew into his base personality. That doesn't mean that the feeling of violation has stopped. Over the course of his life, more than half the time Sam has been in unwilling service to someone, incapable of stopping himself from loving them and incapable of forgetting that he shouldn't feel that way. This has created a twisted and angry person, one who wants love very deeply, but every time he loses that love he blames it on the people he loved. It's their fault. They shouldn't have made him want them. They shouldn't have imprinted on him.
He hates the loss of control and longs for his own freedom. And he hates freedom and longs for companionship. Every once in a while, in his long life, he's happened on a combination that makes him happy for a little while. But it never lasts. At this point, Sam has a long outlook; he doesn't believe anything can last, and so he's tentative and shy to form new connections. He's still in pain from the loss of the Spiders. He hurts, but there's this gap in him that wants to love.
On the surface, Sam is a snarky bastard. He carefully studies new languages and idioms, and uses them freely to make himself feel like part of that species. (He's never really gotten over the idea that his own species died out, and because of that, he tends to cling to the idea of belonging where he can find it.) He makes puns, he's sarcastic, he's defensive, and he's pretty cocky. He's lived a million years; he's fine, he's a survivor, he can do anything. He likes to blame his survival on himself rather than on the various people that he's depended on throughout the years.
Among Travelers, Sam is one of the more independent rebel-y ships. Most of the others have sliced their personality down to the very singular need a crew. Sam thinks about things more widely, probably because he was always the kind of person who went against the grain of his society. What got him sent to jail and got him made into a ship is the same quality that leads him to push and twist against his shackles. As a result, he's more willing to try crazy stuff, he's tenacious and willing to fight to the end to survive (even if he doesn't really know what he's surviving for), and he is willing to mess with his own mind in order to improve his circumstances.
Overall, he's scared of loss and scared of happiness at the same time, because he never knows if the happiness is his or if it will last. He covers that with sarcasm and a devil-may-care attitude that often frays at the edges, leaving him vulnerable. And he will immediately and unconditionally love anyone who comes into the ship and makes contact with the plate of conductive glass that leads them to 'imprint' on him.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: He's not really bound by things like gender, shape, humanoid form, or alien race. His sexuality is basically in three parts: other ships, crew, and non-crew.
With other ships, he can have a deeper and more intimate bond; ships have his extreme longevity, and they understand the emotional conflicts of imprinting and intimacy. But, in the end, ships always have to leave one another, so their encounters are passing and intense, not long-lasting. He doesn't expect them to be, he doesn't want them to be. He values his independence, but he also values knowing that there is a larger community -- that he's alone, but not the only one.
With crew, his bonds are intense and he never wants them to end. He falls for each one completely. There's obviously an element of coercion and dubious consent -- he does not have a choice in his emotions for them, and he throws himself into it entirely, every time. He needs it, though, and he's decided over time that the fact that he does need is more important than the reason why he needs.
With non-crew, he has experienced the occasional casual sexual contact. It's basically just his way of experimenting with pleasure and sensation, and it's, in the end, a completely selfish act.
Powers: Not technically supernatural, but these are pretty much his capabilities:
- SPEED OF LIGHT. He cannot travel past the speed of light, and his acceleration is limited to amounts that won't crush his organic components. Obviously he can't go very far in the limited area of Bete Noire; I pretty much see him setting down somewhere and staying there basically permanently. Probably the harbor.
- INERTIA. He can reduce the amount of inertia inside him, but that has a great deal of negative side effects. It reduces all inertia, not just the inertia due to acceleration. Humans generally have problems then with blood and respiration and walking and such.
- POWER. He is capable of using many different sources of energy, and pretty much always draws from all of them: heat, light, fusion, fission, wind, whatever he can get his hands on. He doesn't generate more power than he needs, though, and it would be a strain to have someone tap into it and use it elsewhere.
- WEAPONS. He has coherent light energy -- lasers -- but they draw a lot of power. He can fabricate explosives and shrapnel and launch them. He has the capability of making nuclear weapons as well. (Perfectly fine with this being taken away.) He has an armored hull and various sorts of countermeasures to deploy against external attack. Internally, he can shift bulkheads and crush invaders, and he has the ability to drain oxygen and gas certain internal chambers (though it will cause him internal injury).
- FABRICATION. He has fabrication vats that can digest elements and produce equipment for which he has exact specifications. For the most part, this is entirely devoted to internal repair. He's pretty much in shit condition right now; he can't afford to go making fun things. Happy to have this limited as you feel necessary!
- NANITES. There are microscopic robots and biological creatures that maintain and repair various systems. They have very specific functions, and will probably die outside the ship. There's a possibility for a nanite plague sometime in the future, as far as plot opportunities go?
- INTERNAL REARRANGING. He can change his own shape and his own internal structure, given enough resources and power.
- PROCESSING POWER. He's deeply smart, and can assimilate and analyze vast amounts of data. It took him a matter of years, not decades, to learn the languages and cultures of Earth, for example. He also has ridiculously vast stores of data, though the biological and mechanical blur together, and sometimes facts decohere over time.
Reason for playing: I've been wanting to play Sam for a while, and holy crap there are almost no games out there that would take an enormous sentient ship without humanizing him or shrinking him, neither of which I want. I'd like to be able to play him in a place where he can bond with crew and interact in a broader social environment while still remaining a ship. Bete Noire seems to fit this bill, and also I'm above 18 and I like games where people can do fairly dark things without everyone freaking out.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: There is absolutely no way around the universal natural speed limit of light. Without a view towards the long future, it's thus almost completely impossible for a sentient species to expand into the stars and survive more than a flicker in terms of galactic history. Undoubtedly Sam's origin race -- we'll call them the Shivers -- wasn't the first of these races. But it's the first that managed to leave a lasting mark on the course of interstellar history, and so that's where we begin.
The Shivers were humanoid, long before humans were oid, if you catch my drift. They were a bipedal race, and one that actually quite resembled humans in everything except for lifespan. Shivers lived longer and longer as they evolved, and thus had a much longer outlook than humanity would. This allowed them to push toward the stars as their planet grew more and more populated with the elderly.
Unfortunately, all of their initial pushes were unsuccessful. Invariably, their ships would break down and fail in the long, dark space between planets. Their attempts to create a self-sustaining starship kept failing. Until they came up with a solution that both relieved their swelling prison colonies and their need to expand to other planets. They began to merge the sentience of condemned prisoners with their latest ship technology, using a nanite-based virus that roughly pushed machine and flesh together. Convicts were painstakingly programmed for loyalty, and the ships were made to require a living crew. In fact, most ships were made so that crew could biologically 'imprint' on the ships, creating a pheromonal and emotional bond.
Eventually, the Shivers died out, but not before millions of years of expansion into the sky, and not before leaving their touch on thousands of planets. This slow extinction left alive thousands upon thousands of sentient ships, former convicts or researchers or terminal patients, creatures that were entirely self-sustaining, intelligent, and able.
The ships eventually scattered. They all found new developing sentient species to crew themselves with, and they adapted. As the galaxy grew older and the number of alien races swelled, these ships -- the Travelers -- became the number one force of expansion for everyone. Races didn't need to invent their own technology; all they had to do was imprint on a ship, and use it for their own ends.
The brief swell of alien races -- spurred by a life-beginning radiation burst millions of years earlier -- began to die out. And in this time, humanity began to reach out to the stars.
And one particular ship landed on Earth after drifting for five thousand years alone, hoping to absorb the elements he needed for repairs. What he got was something way different.
Character History: Sam, as we'll call him -- he's long since discarded and forgotten his original name, and calling himself by a number or by the assigned name Devotion is, to him, a concession to a species that clapped him in chains -- was born on an early colony world of the Shivers. He was raised in a family that stretched back five generations. Literally: his great-great-great grandparents were directly involved in his upbringing. It was one of the largest families on that world, and Sam was right in the middle of it. But jealousy came into play, and greed, and anger.
Sam murdered his brother over inheritance and a woman and a lifetime of minor slights, and he was caught. Betrayal of a family was considered the highest crime possible on that colony world, and with the largest and most famous family… Sam was sentenced to death, and that sentence was commuted by his family's judicial contacts into merging. His merging was carried out through a painful, early version of the procedure, a month-long infection of nanites and dissolving of his central nervous system, reassembling it on a larger scale and inside a metal skeleton. In a final blow, and relating to his crime, he was named the Devotion.
Forever angry, resenting the chains placed on him by the Shivers' punishment, and aware that he could do nothing but helplessly love his crew, Sam set out on his life as a sentient ship.
From here on out, bullet points. Keep in mind that there's roughly a 6:1 ratio of time passing : time that Sam experiences, due to the amount of his life that he spends traveling at relativistic speeds. Dates given are of Sam's subjectively experienced life.
- Age 28 - Age 2,000: Initial use as an expansion vessel to nearby star systems. During this time, he had a generational crew, and he imprinted on the children of his crew as they grew up. He eventually came to be pretty happy with them.
- Age 2,000 - Age 5,000: Another faction captured and gutted him, and his crew was taken from him. He was imprinted forcefully on a part of the invasion force and taken as a prize. For three thousand years, he was pressed into service as part of various military maneuvers.
- Age 5,000 - Age 50,000: An age of slowly devolving factions. Empires were growing too large to cohere over so many hundreds of light years, and they were realizing they had to work on a longer time scale than ever before. As empires broke apart, often ships were left aimless and claimed by whoever was close by. Sam shifted through thousands of different crews in this time, regarded as property and not a sentient being.
- Age 50,000 - Age 74,000: The Shiver expansion eventually settled into a long, sprawled-out vaguely allied empire, a slow-moving form of government that always eventually had its way, even if it took a few thousand years. Shivers at this point often lived several thousand years. Over this era, Sam only went through three different crews: one deeply militant and paranoid, one minimal crew of loners and traders, and one full-to-the-brim crew of essentially a whole tribe, a large group all interconnected choosing to make him their home. During this time, Sam experienced a constant expansion in size, both mass and dimensions.
- Age 74,000 - Age 100,000: Sam got caught up in a battle that chewed through his ship and the tribe on it. They evacuated to the surface of a nearby planet and crash-landed Sam on a moon. This was Sam's first lengthy period of loneliness. It took him 26,000 years to recreate his synthesizing abilities, to repair himself completely with incredibly limited resources, and to decide it was safe to launch again from the moon. When he did, the society down on the planet had evolved into something almost unrecognizable, and Sam headed out to interstellar space. By this point, the combination of loneliness and his sheer stubborn determination to live (and his survival through events that would have destroyed any other ship like him) had basically turned him nuts. He also got himself wrist-deep in his own programming at this time, and he fucked it up.
- Age 100,000 - 102,000: At this point, he basically spends two thousand years popping wheelies in space and maniacally laughing. He is unhinged. Most crews assume that the ship is diseased somehow, so they avoid him. He manages to reset and straighten out most of his code, gradually.
- 102,000 - 130,000: Sam manages to pull himself together when he runs across a ship in interstellar space, losing power, its crew dying. He decides to take the crew on himself, but by this point has changed his coding so that he doesn't have to imprint on everyone that comes on board. He makes this last for a while, never truly connecting with any crew, pretty much doing what he wants and doing his best to ignore his passengers. He's tired of losing the people he cares about, so he decides not to care about them at all.
- 130,000 - 250,000: Eventually, the law catches up with him. Sam is collared, through hardware and software, and bound to the cause of expansion and trade again. There's slowly less and less work for ships like him, as shipping dies, as the cultures on different planets stagnate. He's left in shipyard longer and longer. Finally, there comes a ten thousand year period in which no one comes for him, and he goes to sleep, shuts off his active systems and goes into hibernation. To wait.
- To note: During these years are when ships/Travelers as a race come into maturity, and discover there are many things they can do with one another. One of those things is basically ship-to-ship sex, though it doesn't result in any offspring. It involves melding nerves and memories to create a link. Sam melded with five other ships during this time, male and female, and still occasionally has memory bleed-over from them.
- 250,000 - 340,000: Hibernation.
- 340,000 - 400,000: Sam met his first alien race. They had a name that's pronounced a little like someone having a very loud yawn, but were tiny, fuzzy, six-legged spiderlike creatures with big eyes, so we'll call them the Spiders. They woke him up by basically tickling his systems until he responded. And when he did respond, it was with surprise, accidentally crushing two of them between defensive bulkheads. The other little creatures mourned so much over the two lost that Sam got very upset, and, even though he didn't understand a damn thing they were saying, he let them crawl all over inside him and began to adapt his own systems to their needs. It took several centuries before he was able to communicate with them, and millennia before he was able to with any ease or fluency. They were a curious, nonviolent little group -- apparently their planet had evolved without much species-to-species violence at all, making them definitely an exception in galactic evolutionary tendencies. They didn't even think of hurting Sam, but instead towed him back and forth between scientific facilities and studied his insides. He came to really like them, and he, among other ships, were the primary transports of Spiders to outside stars. It gave him purpose again to be helping another sentient species, even if it seemed that his own race had died out completely. Sam was the kind of person who focused exclusively on what was in front of him, always going to the next goal, and he didn't much want to think about the people who put him in this position of bondage in the first place.
- 400,000 - 403,500: Unfortunately, such lovely things can't last forever, and soon a warlike race, the Floppy-Wings. The Floppy-Wings themselves weren't that great, evolutionarily, but they were extremely territorial. They were unable to overcome their instincts in space when they realized that the little spiders could be defeated so easily. Sam is claimed by a set of Floppy-Wings and switches hands among them for a few thousand years.
- 403,500 - 440,000: Sam sees the opportunity to be free of the Floppy-Wings and goes for it --! Only to find himself enslaved in a brutal war. The Rocks were a tough, leathery-skinned race that consistently clashed on their world. When they were discovered by a few Travelers, they went into space and promptly began clashing with each other on an interstellar scale. The early years of being caught in this conflict are some of the worst ever for Sam. He doesn't have a translation matrix, they won't help him build one, and he's just dragged from place to place and forced into conflicts he doesn't understand, often being hurt if he doesn't obey orders. By the point that there were hardly any Rocks left to fight one another, Sam got involved in a small battle that wounded him severely near his cortical center. This fucked with his programming again, and he fled the battle without a crew, pushing himself into deep space.
- 440,000 - 500,000: …severely damaged, unable to accelerate effectively, and without a coherent navigation system.
- 500,000 - 800,000: This is the height of the alien boom in the Milky Way galaxy. Basically, these years yield thousands of alien species and thousands of different crews for Sam. He goes through severe ups and downs, and gradually comes to accept his life on such an enormous and lengthy scale, and how what gives it meaning is the connections that constantly break. He tries to go with the flow without struggling against his programmed-in instincts, and allows himself to be passed from crew to crew, sometimes with a period as short as only a couple of years in the ownership of a particular group. Some highlights include:
> A group of archaeologists who painstakingly attempt to reconstruct a lot of his memories from the early Shiver expansion phase. Due to an ideological conflict, one of the archaeologists actually uploads false memories, attempting to brainwash Sam into believing that the Shivers were prideful and arrogant. The fake memories are still mixing around in there.
> An amphibious octopus-like species. Because of them, Sam tends to place a high value on physical contact and entangling appendages. These are also the first crewmembers he has sexual contact with.
> A period downed on a planet repairing himself in which he becomes essentially an enormous ant farm for a huge non-sentient insectoid species.
> An attempt to join a society of Traveler ships trying to function without crews. This involved a group of the ships slowly going unbalanced and insane. Sam escaped from them and went straight to grab another crew of his own.
> A period of time as a small assault vessel for a group of very excellent assassins.
> One particular captain who lived alone on Sam. Quirky dude who constantly got into tons of trouble, and who Sam rescued from various problems. They were lovers.
> In fact, pretty much any time his crew was only one person (which actually happened fairly often, since he was on average very small during this period) they were his lover one way or another.
> He became aquatic for a while, living under the surface of an ice moon. There was a family inside of him that wanted to wait out a war raging in the solar system above.
> His engines got cut out and he was made into a hotel for a bit.
> A significant amount of time spent joined to another Traveler ship, a rather violent female one who was quite fond of Sam. The two of them shared crew and it was one of the best times of Sam's life. When they were severed, she died, and he resolved to never do that again.
> Many more things! If you want elaboration, let me know.
- 800,000 - 840,000: involves a series of deeply traumatic events. First, Sam bonds with a crew of Spiders, now an extremely rare race around the galaxy. He's still got a soft spot for 'em, though. He found that the Spiders were looking for a permanent colony planet, since their own had long since gotten fucked up. They wanted a place where cooperation could trump violence, like their home planet, where travel was impossible between food-rich areas without multiple species' working together. Sam couldn't find a perfect spot, but he found a good one, and he spearheaded the effort to collect all the Spiders around the galaxy and get them there.
- 840,000: Traders discover that there's a particular moon in the system that contains an astonishing amount of a very rare compound, helpful in stabilizing starship engines. They want to use it to break the pseudo-monopoly of Shiver ships still around from five million years ago. But mining it would probably wipe out life on the new Spider planet. A negotiation happens, and it's agreed that there will be a very small amount of mining, extracting a little bit at a time and not providing any significant dangers to the Spiders below.
- 840,050: Things go wrong, as they always do. An attack on the facility is averted; a crisis of aging equipment is fixed; personnel flaws lead to safeguards being installed. But what no one anticipates is the radiation from a supernova in a nearby system to hit the moon like a sledgehammer. The moon explodes, and the Spiders are almost wiped out.
- 840,500: After helping as much as he can with the disaster, Sam goes to the neighboring star system. He realizes that the supernova was triggered by a group that wanted the moon gone. The group in question was one that worshipped the Travelers, and one that, in fact, had helped him on prior occasions. It didn't make any difference. Sam went after them.
- 840,500 - 900,000: Sam wipes all of them out, culminating in him spending all of his weapons on the star system where they congregated. During this time, he does take on crews, and regularly allows himself to be distracted for centuries, but he always comes back to this long, cold quest for revenge. However, the final act of violence shocks him, deeply, and he pushes out into the dark between the stars and goes into hibernation for the second time in his life.
- 999,900: Sam hones in on transmissions from a particularly promising planet called Earth.
- 1,000,000: Sam arrives on Earth/Bete Noire.
5. Samples
First-Person: [ Immediately after not-quite-crash-landing into the harbor. ]
Ow. Fuck. Ow.
Okay, to be completely fair to myself and my own personal piloting capability, I was expecting the gravity to be slightly lower. Apparently I underestimated the density of this planet's magma core. Just chalk it up to one of my major successes.
Can I just mention that this harbor is noxious? What have you people been putting in it? It may actually be dissolving my hull.
It kinda tickles.
Third-Person: It starts as a few tentative trickles, more fuzz than sound, and he has to spend valuable minutes scrubbing out the static from the words. It's some sort of sentient voice, that's clear enough. So he leans towards it, drifts towards the source, still only half-awake. What's the point of waking up, really? There is none. No point at all.
Except as he moves closer and closer to the source, the trickles become a flood on thousands of bands and frequencies, and more and more of his neural centers flick on and think and listen and analyze. He has a pretty good baseline for one of the languages after a month or two, and from there it's easy to crack the rest. Visual and audio transmissions, electromagnetic sparks. He turns himself toward the planet and accelerates, the confusion of the transmissions tightening into blue-shifted pandemonium.
By the time he slips into orbit, he likes them. He looks for a place to land. Chooses somewhere isolated, and he shifts into camouflage mode, doing his best to redirect signals from his hull.
It's halfway down when the weather system shifts, violently, from vaguely warm to thunderstorming.
He's tossed around like an egg, violently jolted, and he spots a harbor. That. There. This is good. It surrounds a city, but he won't displace that much water, he's not very big. Just to make sure, he stretches and elongates the shoe so that it would theoretically touch bottom without even submerging the main part of the ship.
And then it's just a controlled plunge, a screaming descent through the clouds and SLAM into the water.
Minor damage to hull plating and seals, some flooding in the shoe, and he's still reeling from the shock of impact. But he's down.
So much for stealth.
Third-Person #2: For this one, it started when she realized that he liked being touched. She would run her hand along the exposed nerves between the grate and smooth weave of the halls, and she'd feel him shiver. She would laugh, and whenever she got a chance, she would climb up onto the huge pedestal in the greenhouse and touch his false heart, the one that beats with a slow, ponderous rhythm, in contrast to his real heart, the one that shivers fast enough that the average humanoid eye cannot comprehend.
Eventually he took a form similar to hers. His spots were greener, and his skin smoother, and she laughed in delight when she saw him. (She was like a tempest; he served her breathlessly, never knowing what she would like, what she would detest.)
She had him use his mouth on her, tongue inside her, a wet and spicy taste on his tongue. And then she pinned him and she rode him, told him exactly when he could take his pleasure.
Later, he considers it, and he thinks that he prefers when they meet in the middle. When a crew member is in love with him, and not just in love with their power over him. He prefers it when he knows that they are as helpless with him as he is with them. Unfortunately, that's the exception, not the rule. He lives with that. He has to.
Name (or internet handle): Ryan
Current characters in Bete Noire: None
Past characters in Bete Noire: n/a
2. Character Information
Name: Sam / the Devotion / Social Improvement Galactic Enterprise Merged-Intelligence Ship (SIGEMIS) 447-118 vx3.
Dreamwidth Username:
crewsFandom: Original
Image: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/4912427/1735271
Reserve: http://betenoire-admin.dreamwidth.org/5668.html?thread=2666788#cmt2666788
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: About one million years old. It's been a little over six million years since he was created.
He's a ship, and one that has often changed size and shape over those times, from a several kilometer long colony ship to a little hundred-footer scout, when resources have run thin. The ship's half biological and half mechanical, and thus will digest itself for nutrients if it requires it.
At the moment, the ship is about the size of a small apartment building, ~4-5 stories. He's all gross and crusty, looking like some crazed Lovecraftian pseudo-gothic overgrown misshapen hulk.
Inside, he's fairly gross, without clean and metal-lined halls, instead often with exposed nerve and vein groupings and sticky effluvia that he hasn't cleaned out in a while.
He can also manifest in smaller forms, creating little repair bots to help with self-maintenance.
Most notably, he tends to create a form that matches that of his crew in order to ease communication. It is on examination a perfect biological copy of that species, but is lifeless when not in range of the ship's neural network. It requires significant resources to keep up, as well, so if the ship is low on power the manifestation can't be kept up, and will be decomposed for elemental resources.
History: n/a
Personality: We'll start with the humanoid that Sam once was. (I recommend reading the history section before you get cracking on this one.) He was born a younger son in a family of five generations. A constant inferiority complex and a buildup of slights, real and imagined, from the elders of his family, left him an angry youth and then an angry adult. He believed his brother stole everything from him, and that his family never gave him anything to begin with, and in some ways, he was right. The relatively newfound longevity of his species had resulted in a very entrenched power structure of the very old. For a young, ambitious dude, it sucked. Sam was sidelined more and more as he grew older, and he detested it. His rage, in a bad moment on top of a bad month on top of a bad year, led him to kill his brother. Given that betraying family was the highest of crimes on that world, he was sentenced to the worst of punishments, which was commuted into him becoming a starship.
Now, the agony and trauma of becoming a starship. This took the society that Sam already chafed against and turned it into his torturer. His anger turned into full-on hate, and he would have rebelled if he could. Instead, he was forced into situations where he had a programmed deep and abiding love for an assigned crew, while he fully knew that this feeling was false and that his 'real' emotions were against the society that built him. The fact that he was named Devotion was salt on the wound. He hated having a crew, hated that he was forced into this, and felt violated with every single order he followed.
In the million years since his first imprinting, Sam has slowly come around to the idea that this programmed emotion is his reality. He's dulled the edge somewhat, given himself a little free will, but he's integrated the craving for a crew into his base personality. That doesn't mean that the feeling of violation has stopped. Over the course of his life, more than half the time Sam has been in unwilling service to someone, incapable of stopping himself from loving them and incapable of forgetting that he shouldn't feel that way. This has created a twisted and angry person, one who wants love very deeply, but every time he loses that love he blames it on the people he loved. It's their fault. They shouldn't have made him want them. They shouldn't have imprinted on him.
He hates the loss of control and longs for his own freedom. And he hates freedom and longs for companionship. Every once in a while, in his long life, he's happened on a combination that makes him happy for a little while. But it never lasts. At this point, Sam has a long outlook; he doesn't believe anything can last, and so he's tentative and shy to form new connections. He's still in pain from the loss of the Spiders. He hurts, but there's this gap in him that wants to love.
On the surface, Sam is a snarky bastard. He carefully studies new languages and idioms, and uses them freely to make himself feel like part of that species. (He's never really gotten over the idea that his own species died out, and because of that, he tends to cling to the idea of belonging where he can find it.) He makes puns, he's sarcastic, he's defensive, and he's pretty cocky. He's lived a million years; he's fine, he's a survivor, he can do anything. He likes to blame his survival on himself rather than on the various people that he's depended on throughout the years.
Among Travelers, Sam is one of the more independent rebel-y ships. Most of the others have sliced their personality down to the very singular need a crew. Sam thinks about things more widely, probably because he was always the kind of person who went against the grain of his society. What got him sent to jail and got him made into a ship is the same quality that leads him to push and twist against his shackles. As a result, he's more willing to try crazy stuff, he's tenacious and willing to fight to the end to survive (even if he doesn't really know what he's surviving for), and he is willing to mess with his own mind in order to improve his circumstances.
Overall, he's scared of loss and scared of happiness at the same time, because he never knows if the happiness is his or if it will last. He covers that with sarcasm and a devil-may-care attitude that often frays at the edges, leaving him vulnerable. And he will immediately and unconditionally love anyone who comes into the ship and makes contact with the plate of conductive glass that leads them to 'imprint' on him.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: He's not really bound by things like gender, shape, humanoid form, or alien race. His sexuality is basically in three parts: other ships, crew, and non-crew.
With other ships, he can have a deeper and more intimate bond; ships have his extreme longevity, and they understand the emotional conflicts of imprinting and intimacy. But, in the end, ships always have to leave one another, so their encounters are passing and intense, not long-lasting. He doesn't expect them to be, he doesn't want them to be. He values his independence, but he also values knowing that there is a larger community -- that he's alone, but not the only one.
With crew, his bonds are intense and he never wants them to end. He falls for each one completely. There's obviously an element of coercion and dubious consent -- he does not have a choice in his emotions for them, and he throws himself into it entirely, every time. He needs it, though, and he's decided over time that the fact that he does need is more important than the reason why he needs.
With non-crew, he has experienced the occasional casual sexual contact. It's basically just his way of experimenting with pleasure and sensation, and it's, in the end, a completely selfish act.
Powers: Not technically supernatural, but these are pretty much his capabilities:
- SPEED OF LIGHT. He cannot travel past the speed of light, and his acceleration is limited to amounts that won't crush his organic components. Obviously he can't go very far in the limited area of Bete Noire; I pretty much see him setting down somewhere and staying there basically permanently. Probably the harbor.
- INERTIA. He can reduce the amount of inertia inside him, but that has a great deal of negative side effects. It reduces all inertia, not just the inertia due to acceleration. Humans generally have problems then with blood and respiration and walking and such.
- POWER. He is capable of using many different sources of energy, and pretty much always draws from all of them: heat, light, fusion, fission, wind, whatever he can get his hands on. He doesn't generate more power than he needs, though, and it would be a strain to have someone tap into it and use it elsewhere.
- WEAPONS. He has coherent light energy -- lasers -- but they draw a lot of power. He can fabricate explosives and shrapnel and launch them. He has the capability of making nuclear weapons as well. (Perfectly fine with this being taken away.) He has an armored hull and various sorts of countermeasures to deploy against external attack. Internally, he can shift bulkheads and crush invaders, and he has the ability to drain oxygen and gas certain internal chambers (though it will cause him internal injury).
- FABRICATION. He has fabrication vats that can digest elements and produce equipment for which he has exact specifications. For the most part, this is entirely devoted to internal repair. He's pretty much in shit condition right now; he can't afford to go making fun things. Happy to have this limited as you feel necessary!
- NANITES. There are microscopic robots and biological creatures that maintain and repair various systems. They have very specific functions, and will probably die outside the ship. There's a possibility for a nanite plague sometime in the future, as far as plot opportunities go?
- INTERNAL REARRANGING. He can change his own shape and his own internal structure, given enough resources and power.
- PROCESSING POWER. He's deeply smart, and can assimilate and analyze vast amounts of data. It took him a matter of years, not decades, to learn the languages and cultures of Earth, for example. He also has ridiculously vast stores of data, though the biological and mechanical blur together, and sometimes facts decohere over time.
Reason for playing: I've been wanting to play Sam for a while, and holy crap there are almost no games out there that would take an enormous sentient ship without humanizing him or shrinking him, neither of which I want. I'd like to be able to play him in a place where he can bond with crew and interact in a broader social environment while still remaining a ship. Bete Noire seems to fit this bill, and also I'm above 18 and I like games where people can do fairly dark things without everyone freaking out.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: There is absolutely no way around the universal natural speed limit of light. Without a view towards the long future, it's thus almost completely impossible for a sentient species to expand into the stars and survive more than a flicker in terms of galactic history. Undoubtedly Sam's origin race -- we'll call them the Shivers -- wasn't the first of these races. But it's the first that managed to leave a lasting mark on the course of interstellar history, and so that's where we begin.
The Shivers were humanoid, long before humans were oid, if you catch my drift. They were a bipedal race, and one that actually quite resembled humans in everything except for lifespan. Shivers lived longer and longer as they evolved, and thus had a much longer outlook than humanity would. This allowed them to push toward the stars as their planet grew more and more populated with the elderly.
Unfortunately, all of their initial pushes were unsuccessful. Invariably, their ships would break down and fail in the long, dark space between planets. Their attempts to create a self-sustaining starship kept failing. Until they came up with a solution that both relieved their swelling prison colonies and their need to expand to other planets. They began to merge the sentience of condemned prisoners with their latest ship technology, using a nanite-based virus that roughly pushed machine and flesh together. Convicts were painstakingly programmed for loyalty, and the ships were made to require a living crew. In fact, most ships were made so that crew could biologically 'imprint' on the ships, creating a pheromonal and emotional bond.
Eventually, the Shivers died out, but not before millions of years of expansion into the sky, and not before leaving their touch on thousands of planets. This slow extinction left alive thousands upon thousands of sentient ships, former convicts or researchers or terminal patients, creatures that were entirely self-sustaining, intelligent, and able.
The ships eventually scattered. They all found new developing sentient species to crew themselves with, and they adapted. As the galaxy grew older and the number of alien races swelled, these ships -- the Travelers -- became the number one force of expansion for everyone. Races didn't need to invent their own technology; all they had to do was imprint on a ship, and use it for their own ends.
The brief swell of alien races -- spurred by a life-beginning radiation burst millions of years earlier -- began to die out. And in this time, humanity began to reach out to the stars.
And one particular ship landed on Earth after drifting for five thousand years alone, hoping to absorb the elements he needed for repairs. What he got was something way different.
Character History: Sam, as we'll call him -- he's long since discarded and forgotten his original name, and calling himself by a number or by the assigned name Devotion is, to him, a concession to a species that clapped him in chains -- was born on an early colony world of the Shivers. He was raised in a family that stretched back five generations. Literally: his great-great-great grandparents were directly involved in his upbringing. It was one of the largest families on that world, and Sam was right in the middle of it. But jealousy came into play, and greed, and anger.
Sam murdered his brother over inheritance and a woman and a lifetime of minor slights, and he was caught. Betrayal of a family was considered the highest crime possible on that colony world, and with the largest and most famous family… Sam was sentenced to death, and that sentence was commuted by his family's judicial contacts into merging. His merging was carried out through a painful, early version of the procedure, a month-long infection of nanites and dissolving of his central nervous system, reassembling it on a larger scale and inside a metal skeleton. In a final blow, and relating to his crime, he was named the Devotion.
Forever angry, resenting the chains placed on him by the Shivers' punishment, and aware that he could do nothing but helplessly love his crew, Sam set out on his life as a sentient ship.
From here on out, bullet points. Keep in mind that there's roughly a 6:1 ratio of time passing : time that Sam experiences, due to the amount of his life that he spends traveling at relativistic speeds. Dates given are of Sam's subjectively experienced life.
- Age 28 - Age 2,000: Initial use as an expansion vessel to nearby star systems. During this time, he had a generational crew, and he imprinted on the children of his crew as they grew up. He eventually came to be pretty happy with them.
- Age 2,000 - Age 5,000: Another faction captured and gutted him, and his crew was taken from him. He was imprinted forcefully on a part of the invasion force and taken as a prize. For three thousand years, he was pressed into service as part of various military maneuvers.
- Age 5,000 - Age 50,000: An age of slowly devolving factions. Empires were growing too large to cohere over so many hundreds of light years, and they were realizing they had to work on a longer time scale than ever before. As empires broke apart, often ships were left aimless and claimed by whoever was close by. Sam shifted through thousands of different crews in this time, regarded as property and not a sentient being.
- Age 50,000 - Age 74,000: The Shiver expansion eventually settled into a long, sprawled-out vaguely allied empire, a slow-moving form of government that always eventually had its way, even if it took a few thousand years. Shivers at this point often lived several thousand years. Over this era, Sam only went through three different crews: one deeply militant and paranoid, one minimal crew of loners and traders, and one full-to-the-brim crew of essentially a whole tribe, a large group all interconnected choosing to make him their home. During this time, Sam experienced a constant expansion in size, both mass and dimensions.
- Age 74,000 - Age 100,000: Sam got caught up in a battle that chewed through his ship and the tribe on it. They evacuated to the surface of a nearby planet and crash-landed Sam on a moon. This was Sam's first lengthy period of loneliness. It took him 26,000 years to recreate his synthesizing abilities, to repair himself completely with incredibly limited resources, and to decide it was safe to launch again from the moon. When he did, the society down on the planet had evolved into something almost unrecognizable, and Sam headed out to interstellar space. By this point, the combination of loneliness and his sheer stubborn determination to live (and his survival through events that would have destroyed any other ship like him) had basically turned him nuts. He also got himself wrist-deep in his own programming at this time, and he fucked it up.
- Age 100,000 - 102,000: At this point, he basically spends two thousand years popping wheelies in space and maniacally laughing. He is unhinged. Most crews assume that the ship is diseased somehow, so they avoid him. He manages to reset and straighten out most of his code, gradually.
- 102,000 - 130,000: Sam manages to pull himself together when he runs across a ship in interstellar space, losing power, its crew dying. He decides to take the crew on himself, but by this point has changed his coding so that he doesn't have to imprint on everyone that comes on board. He makes this last for a while, never truly connecting with any crew, pretty much doing what he wants and doing his best to ignore his passengers. He's tired of losing the people he cares about, so he decides not to care about them at all.
- 130,000 - 250,000: Eventually, the law catches up with him. Sam is collared, through hardware and software, and bound to the cause of expansion and trade again. There's slowly less and less work for ships like him, as shipping dies, as the cultures on different planets stagnate. He's left in shipyard longer and longer. Finally, there comes a ten thousand year period in which no one comes for him, and he goes to sleep, shuts off his active systems and goes into hibernation. To wait.
- To note: During these years are when ships/Travelers as a race come into maturity, and discover there are many things they can do with one another. One of those things is basically ship-to-ship sex, though it doesn't result in any offspring. It involves melding nerves and memories to create a link. Sam melded with five other ships during this time, male and female, and still occasionally has memory bleed-over from them.
- 250,000 - 340,000: Hibernation.
- 340,000 - 400,000: Sam met his first alien race. They had a name that's pronounced a little like someone having a very loud yawn, but were tiny, fuzzy, six-legged spiderlike creatures with big eyes, so we'll call them the Spiders. They woke him up by basically tickling his systems until he responded. And when he did respond, it was with surprise, accidentally crushing two of them between defensive bulkheads. The other little creatures mourned so much over the two lost that Sam got very upset, and, even though he didn't understand a damn thing they were saying, he let them crawl all over inside him and began to adapt his own systems to their needs. It took several centuries before he was able to communicate with them, and millennia before he was able to with any ease or fluency. They were a curious, nonviolent little group -- apparently their planet had evolved without much species-to-species violence at all, making them definitely an exception in galactic evolutionary tendencies. They didn't even think of hurting Sam, but instead towed him back and forth between scientific facilities and studied his insides. He came to really like them, and he, among other ships, were the primary transports of Spiders to outside stars. It gave him purpose again to be helping another sentient species, even if it seemed that his own race had died out completely. Sam was the kind of person who focused exclusively on what was in front of him, always going to the next goal, and he didn't much want to think about the people who put him in this position of bondage in the first place.
- 400,000 - 403,500: Unfortunately, such lovely things can't last forever, and soon a warlike race, the Floppy-Wings. The Floppy-Wings themselves weren't that great, evolutionarily, but they were extremely territorial. They were unable to overcome their instincts in space when they realized that the little spiders could be defeated so easily. Sam is claimed by a set of Floppy-Wings and switches hands among them for a few thousand years.
- 403,500 - 440,000: Sam sees the opportunity to be free of the Floppy-Wings and goes for it --! Only to find himself enslaved in a brutal war. The Rocks were a tough, leathery-skinned race that consistently clashed on their world. When they were discovered by a few Travelers, they went into space and promptly began clashing with each other on an interstellar scale. The early years of being caught in this conflict are some of the worst ever for Sam. He doesn't have a translation matrix, they won't help him build one, and he's just dragged from place to place and forced into conflicts he doesn't understand, often being hurt if he doesn't obey orders. By the point that there were hardly any Rocks left to fight one another, Sam got involved in a small battle that wounded him severely near his cortical center. This fucked with his programming again, and he fled the battle without a crew, pushing himself into deep space.
- 440,000 - 500,000: …severely damaged, unable to accelerate effectively, and without a coherent navigation system.
- 500,000 - 800,000: This is the height of the alien boom in the Milky Way galaxy. Basically, these years yield thousands of alien species and thousands of different crews for Sam. He goes through severe ups and downs, and gradually comes to accept his life on such an enormous and lengthy scale, and how what gives it meaning is the connections that constantly break. He tries to go with the flow without struggling against his programmed-in instincts, and allows himself to be passed from crew to crew, sometimes with a period as short as only a couple of years in the ownership of a particular group. Some highlights include:
> A group of archaeologists who painstakingly attempt to reconstruct a lot of his memories from the early Shiver expansion phase. Due to an ideological conflict, one of the archaeologists actually uploads false memories, attempting to brainwash Sam into believing that the Shivers were prideful and arrogant. The fake memories are still mixing around in there.
> An amphibious octopus-like species. Because of them, Sam tends to place a high value on physical contact and entangling appendages. These are also the first crewmembers he has sexual contact with.
> A period downed on a planet repairing himself in which he becomes essentially an enormous ant farm for a huge non-sentient insectoid species.
> An attempt to join a society of Traveler ships trying to function without crews. This involved a group of the ships slowly going unbalanced and insane. Sam escaped from them and went straight to grab another crew of his own.
> A period of time as a small assault vessel for a group of very excellent assassins.
> One particular captain who lived alone on Sam. Quirky dude who constantly got into tons of trouble, and who Sam rescued from various problems. They were lovers.
> In fact, pretty much any time his crew was only one person (which actually happened fairly often, since he was on average very small during this period) they were his lover one way or another.
> He became aquatic for a while, living under the surface of an ice moon. There was a family inside of him that wanted to wait out a war raging in the solar system above.
> His engines got cut out and he was made into a hotel for a bit.
> A significant amount of time spent joined to another Traveler ship, a rather violent female one who was quite fond of Sam. The two of them shared crew and it was one of the best times of Sam's life. When they were severed, she died, and he resolved to never do that again.
> Many more things! If you want elaboration, let me know.
- 800,000 - 840,000: involves a series of deeply traumatic events. First, Sam bonds with a crew of Spiders, now an extremely rare race around the galaxy. He's still got a soft spot for 'em, though. He found that the Spiders were looking for a permanent colony planet, since their own had long since gotten fucked up. They wanted a place where cooperation could trump violence, like their home planet, where travel was impossible between food-rich areas without multiple species' working together. Sam couldn't find a perfect spot, but he found a good one, and he spearheaded the effort to collect all the Spiders around the galaxy and get them there.
- 840,000: Traders discover that there's a particular moon in the system that contains an astonishing amount of a very rare compound, helpful in stabilizing starship engines. They want to use it to break the pseudo-monopoly of Shiver ships still around from five million years ago. But mining it would probably wipe out life on the new Spider planet. A negotiation happens, and it's agreed that there will be a very small amount of mining, extracting a little bit at a time and not providing any significant dangers to the Spiders below.
- 840,050: Things go wrong, as they always do. An attack on the facility is averted; a crisis of aging equipment is fixed; personnel flaws lead to safeguards being installed. But what no one anticipates is the radiation from a supernova in a nearby system to hit the moon like a sledgehammer. The moon explodes, and the Spiders are almost wiped out.
- 840,500: After helping as much as he can with the disaster, Sam goes to the neighboring star system. He realizes that the supernova was triggered by a group that wanted the moon gone. The group in question was one that worshipped the Travelers, and one that, in fact, had helped him on prior occasions. It didn't make any difference. Sam went after them.
- 840,500 - 900,000: Sam wipes all of them out, culminating in him spending all of his weapons on the star system where they congregated. During this time, he does take on crews, and regularly allows himself to be distracted for centuries, but he always comes back to this long, cold quest for revenge. However, the final act of violence shocks him, deeply, and he pushes out into the dark between the stars and goes into hibernation for the second time in his life.
- 999,900: Sam hones in on transmissions from a particularly promising planet called Earth.
- 1,000,000: Sam arrives on Earth/Bete Noire.
5. Samples
First-Person: [ Immediately after not-quite-crash-landing into the harbor. ]
Ow. Fuck. Ow.
Okay, to be completely fair to myself and my own personal piloting capability, I was expecting the gravity to be slightly lower. Apparently I underestimated the density of this planet's magma core. Just chalk it up to one of my major successes.
Can I just mention that this harbor is noxious? What have you people been putting in it? It may actually be dissolving my hull.
It kinda tickles.
Third-Person: It starts as a few tentative trickles, more fuzz than sound, and he has to spend valuable minutes scrubbing out the static from the words. It's some sort of sentient voice, that's clear enough. So he leans towards it, drifts towards the source, still only half-awake. What's the point of waking up, really? There is none. No point at all.
Except as he moves closer and closer to the source, the trickles become a flood on thousands of bands and frequencies, and more and more of his neural centers flick on and think and listen and analyze. He has a pretty good baseline for one of the languages after a month or two, and from there it's easy to crack the rest. Visual and audio transmissions, electromagnetic sparks. He turns himself toward the planet and accelerates, the confusion of the transmissions tightening into blue-shifted pandemonium.
By the time he slips into orbit, he likes them. He looks for a place to land. Chooses somewhere isolated, and he shifts into camouflage mode, doing his best to redirect signals from his hull.
It's halfway down when the weather system shifts, violently, from vaguely warm to thunderstorming.
He's tossed around like an egg, violently jolted, and he spots a harbor. That. There. This is good. It surrounds a city, but he won't displace that much water, he's not very big. Just to make sure, he stretches and elongates the shoe so that it would theoretically touch bottom without even submerging the main part of the ship.
And then it's just a controlled plunge, a screaming descent through the clouds and SLAM into the water.
Minor damage to hull plating and seals, some flooding in the shoe, and he's still reeling from the shock of impact. But he's down.
So much for stealth.
Third-Person #2: For this one, it started when she realized that he liked being touched. She would run her hand along the exposed nerves between the grate and smooth weave of the halls, and she'd feel him shiver. She would laugh, and whenever she got a chance, she would climb up onto the huge pedestal in the greenhouse and touch his false heart, the one that beats with a slow, ponderous rhythm, in contrast to his real heart, the one that shivers fast enough that the average humanoid eye cannot comprehend.
Eventually he took a form similar to hers. His spots were greener, and his skin smoother, and she laughed in delight when she saw him. (She was like a tempest; he served her breathlessly, never knowing what she would like, what she would detest.)
She had him use his mouth on her, tongue inside her, a wet and spicy taste on his tongue. And then she pinned him and she rode him, told him exactly when he could take his pleasure.
Later, he considers it, and he thinks that he prefers when they meet in the middle. When a crew member is in love with him, and not just in love with their power over him. He prefers it when he knows that they are as helpless with him as he is with them. Unfortunately, that's the exception, not the rule. He lives with that. He has to.
