ILLYRIA APP
Jul. 22nd, 2016 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spoiledeggPlayer Name: MonkeysInPants
Player Age: 28
Character Name: Disaché Amenone
Character Age: 31 (basically equivalent to a human of the same age)
Inventory:
Plain clothing:
- leggings similar to medieval ones plus under-belt to hold them up
- knee-length tunic with belt
- soft boot/slippers
Implanted bio-computer suite, complete with cochlear and retinal implants
Small handheld coilgun with single clip (20 shots) and one rechargeable battery pack (ammo designed to disintegrate against solid surfaces in order to prevent punctures in ship hulls)
Maximum-rated Sanier Nano-hazard Suit
Maximum-rated Nano-hazard containment unit (the approximate size and shape of a small duffle bag)
Contents of bag:
- Dozens of microvials of blood and tissue samples (Human, Sanier, Urcine)
- Vials of inert Zircan nanomachines
- A vial of ‘Red Plague’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Disciple’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Supplicant’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Endless’ nanomachines*
Unaltered Zircan nanomachines in his body*
*details in History
Character Appearance: Disaché is a Sanier, a bipedal species that looks most like a cross between a human and a mandrill or drill. A chance duplication event far back in their evolutionary tree has resulted in them having four sets of eyes and ears (as well as a double-lobed nasal cavities, but those aren’t visible as they have a single pair of nostrils). The upper eyes are used during daytime-level lighting conditions, while the secondary eyes are opened in dim-to-dark lighting conditions. They have small tails primarily composed of fatty tissue.
Disaché in particular is 5’2 and slim. His body fur is blue-black while his skin is pale (only visible on his palms, soles, and face). He has a short, sparse mane for a male his age (which gives him a perpetual teen heart-throb look to other Sanier, but the effect isn’t really cross-species). He has grey irises with dark sclera, and a blue nose. On the left side of his face he has a scar that runs along his cheek and a corresponding notch on his ear.
History:
A race transcended time and space and when it happened became irrelevant. What mattered is that they'd spent the childhood of their species alone. There were no civilizations waiting for them among the stars, no intelligent species to make first contact with. There had only been them and anyone they created. Together - as they were both many and one now - they decided things should be different, and so they cultivated a multiverse.
When a branch bore fruit in the form of a sentient species, they matched it with others that might be able to understand it. They peeled back the bark of space-time and tied the branches together, and where the universes met they put Gates. In this way, the peoples of the multiverse could pass through space and time to meet each other, travelling only years, months, days from Gate to Gate rather than spending eternity searching the galaxy and finding no-one.
To build the Gates they made bodies, composed of countless nanoscopic machines working in concert. Each nanomachine was capable of manipulating matter at an atomic level, as well as serving essentially as a tiny Gate, able to shunt energy from one universe to another. With these abilities, the collective nanite bodies could accomplish almost anything.
Sometimes, by chance space-time event, these bodies were lost, disconnected from the transcended whole and forgotten like so many shed skin cells. One such body fell to the Sanier homeworld and became buried in a mountain.
The Sanier homeworld is a little blue planet orbiting a yellow star along with seven other major planets… and if that sounds familiar, it’s because the planet is a parallel universe twin to humanity’s Earth. Similar in some ways, different than others, intertwined and influencing each other. It’s no surprise then that the name that Disaché knows the planet by - Miva - essentially translates to ‘earth’ or ‘ground’.
While not identical, evolution followed similar wide paths on the twin planets, from single-celled organisms through to vertebrates, fish to land-dwelling creatures, the rise and fall of various megafauna, to the rise of people in the continent humans know as Africa. People spread across the globe, civilizations rose and fell. Saniers and humans both flourished on their own planets.
One civilization of particular importance in Disaché’s history was a tribe of mountain people whose original name has been lost to history. Over a thousand years before Disaché was born, people began to settle the high valleys of the Hyasiv Mountains. Here they began experiencing remarkably long life and exceptional health, healing, beauty, and intelligence. Though remote, the people of the Hyasiv Mountains became renowned in the surrounding territories as mystical healers, known only as myth and legend by some and sought only by the desperate or adventurous.
For centuries the mountain people lived in peace, but a new force arose in the surrounding territories: a growing holy empire who called themselves Enlightened, sweeping across the land with an army devoted to the purpose of converting or crushing every people they came across. When this empire spread to the base of the Hyasiv, it turned its hungry eyes on the mountain people. For the Enlightened, miracles could only be granted by the Holy Pair, Goddess and God, creators of them all. Any supernatural power that existed outside of Them was surely evil and intended to lead good people astray from true Enlightenment. They called the mountain people Corrupted, and did everything in their power to strike them, their civilization, and their name from the world. Only a few escaped the slaughter, disappearing into the surrounding populations.
Outside of cautionary tales, the Corrupted and their miraculous powers were largely forgotten.
Several years before Disaché was born, his mother, Nunana Amenone, followed the bits and pieces of half-erased legend to the valleys of Hyasiv. As a scientist and doctor, Nunana was searching for new treatments, and was drawn to the possibility of miraculous healing. She camped in the mountains for over a year before she discovered the truth behind the myth: mysterious nanoscopic machines saturating the mountain springs. She took the knowledge and the nanites home with her, both in water samples and in her body due to months of drinking the local water.
Her research quickly hit a roadblock. While the machines clearly had the potential to treat illness - encouraging cell growth in wounds, eliminating viruses in infected cells, etc., the nanomachines in the water remained completely inert, and the machines from her own body seemed linked to her thoughts and intentions alone, unable to be manipulated outside of her direct control, making them useless in a wider healthcare context.
While Nunana puzzled over the conundrum of the nanomachines, she decided to have a child. Most Saniers form extremely intense lifelong pair bonds, but not wanting to be tied down with a spouse Nunana instead made a deal with one of her unattached coworkers and artificially inseminated herself. Single parents were looked down upon by the Enlightened-dominated society, but Nunana had little concern about what people thought. The resulting child was Disaché.
During her pregnancy, Nunana put aside her seemingly dead end work with the nanobots to focus on her other medical work and her growing excitement over her developing child. She dreamed great things for her child and in her excitement it didn’t occur to her that the nanites in her body might affect her foetus. It wasn’t until Disaché’s egg was laid and took an abnormally long time to hatch that she began to worry.
Despite his late entry into the world, Disaché was an extremely healthy baby, and it quickly became apparent that he was an extremely intelligent one as well. He hit all his mental development goals far ahead of schedule, and by the age of six he was already reading, writing, and studying the science at an adult level..
Studying him back, Nunana found her nanites in Disaché’s body and began to suspect that they had been influencing Disaché’s development since he was an embryo. Uncertain about what that might mean in the long run, Nunana vowed not to have another child and doted on
Disaché, extremely proud of his accomplishments despite her misgivings, and overlooking the signs that his emotional development wasn’t exactly on track.
One of the things Disaché was most fascinated with was his mother’s nanites. When he was seven, Disaché invented a way to visualize the nanites’ ‘programming’. Too small and simple in design to physically contain data, they had to exist partly on an extradimensional level. At eight, he discovered how to ‘wipe’ the programming that kept the nanites imprinted on Nunana. By the time he was nine, he figured out how to reprogram them.
And that’s when Disaché let the existence and potential of the nanites (almost anything) slip and things fell out of Nunana’s control. The Enlightened government caught wind of it and came for Disaché and the nanite research. Fearing what a zealous conservative government might do with the nearly unlimited potential of the nanomachines, Nunana staged an accident in an attempt to destroy all the research. Unfortunately, without killing herself and her son, she couldn’t truly keep the nanites out of Enlightened hands.
The Enlightened took custody of Disaché and Nunana would have been executed if it weren’t for Disaché being a small child who very adamantly still wanted his mommy. Still, with the Enlightened taking up most of Disaché’s time and watching their interactions closely, Nunana’s influence on him began to wane.
Replicating the nanobot research and replenishing the stock from Nunana’s blood, research into the capabilities of the nanomachines truly began. Manipulating the incredibly complex programming turned out to be something of crapshoot, and it became rapidly apparent that Disaché had a unique intuition for working with the nanites, making this young boy the center of their research efforts. While he had a hand in almost every developed, including the development of antigravity aircraft and artificial gravity for spacecraft, the first thing Disaché truly created for the Enlightened was a strain of nanites that he called Disciple.
Disciple was a first step towards mind control. Injected or ingested, Disciple would subtly alter the Sanier brain to make a person more susceptible to suggestion. Combined with copious propaganda, the Enlightened began to use it to better control unruly populations within their empire. It only resulted in death or brain damage in about 10% of treated individuals.
Disaché became the Enlightened’s wunderkind. Their sacred child sent from the Holy Pair to lead them into a golden age. He was a public figure, basking in the praise and fame. At the age of 12, Disaché was almost assassinated by an insurgent. Nunana hadn’t approved of what Disaché was doing for the Enlightened, but it was the fallout of this that truly started driving a wedge between mother and son. This event also kindled Disaché’s obsession with finding immortality.
Shortly after, the next big event in both Disaché’s life and Sanier history was the arrival of the Seifaan, the Saniers’ first contact with an alien race. The Enlightened did not approve of the Seifaan and their messages of peace and harmony amongst all and their way of life. And as the Enlightened do with all they designate as evil, they decided to wipe them out. And so Disaché’s next great creation was the strain of nanites that would become known as the Red Plague.
Keyed to Seifaan DNA, Red Plague used one of the simplest commands for the nanites: self-replicate. Taking everyone by surprised, the Enlightened launched missiles containing Plague to the Seifaan homeworld, and wherever even a single nanite touched a Seifaan, it would begin to disassemble them at an atomic level in order to replicate. This genocide wiped out over half the Seifaan race and started an intergalactic war between the Sanier and the coalition of alien species the Seifaan belonged to known as the Istiff Alliance.
Their Zircan technology-related technological advances allowed the Sanier to hold their own despite being outnumbered. One of the biggest IA threats to them were Urcine Guardians. After a near-extinction event on their planet, the Urcine had mastered genetic engineering and selective breeding, and the Guardians were the epitome of their efforts to create perfect warriors and protectors, each of them a one-person army. In order to combat this threat, Disaché took a second step towards the creation of mind-control with the Supplicant strain of nanites.
While Supplicant was intended to make the Guardians completely obedient toDisaché’s the Enlightened’s will, it was a massive failure on that front. However, it worked wonderfully as a weapon, resulting in the death or mental collapse of almost all the Guardians.
The Plague War lasted for three years, and would have continued longer if it weren’t for an incident on the Sanier homeworld where a descendent of the Corrupted accidentally switch all the Disciple nanites in the people around him to ‘self-replicate’ mode. This accidental and undirected Red Plague swept across Miva, devouring everything in its path in a true ‘grey goo’ scenario. Only those Sanier off-planet and those with quick access to spacecraft escaped.
This included Disaché and some of the highest ranking Enlightened officials. However, deciding that the Enlightened no longer had anything to offer him, Disaché arranged for them to be captured. Still considered a child, he wasn’t tried for his part in creating nanotech weapons, but he was still considered dangerous and watched carefully. His only engagement with the Zircan nanites for years was as a long-distance consultant helping the IA unravel the secrets of the nanomachines so they could prevent further Red Plague disasters.
With their planet rapidly degrading, the remaining Sanier were given the choice to join the IA or be resettled on an uninhabited planet. Disaché chose the IA and custody of him was given to a Shumel family (a race of very large, very chill aliens). Over the decade and a half, he almost became a productive member of society. He studied medicine, became a doctor, performed medical research under the ethical guidelines of the IA… and he met a young Sanier woman also living in the IA and paired with her to have children. It became perfectly clear that Disaché’s brain chemistry wasn’t quite right for a Sanier, as he never developed any emotional attachment to his wife.
At the age of 28, Disaché decided that IA technology alone couldn’t give him the true immortality that he wanted, and he was certain that the key lay with the Zircan nanobots that still existed within his body. So he planned and made his escape from the IA to the neighbouring human-dominated systems. Luckily for him, humanity is full of many people with more resources than sense who were more than willing to give him work.
After his escape, an Urcine IA Agent named Aeront set out to find him. Aeront was captured and given to Disaché to study. Disaché took this opportunity to perfect Supplicant, finding it much easier to tailor the mind control effects for an individual rather than attempting to generalize the effects. His experiment successful, Disaché made Aeront his bodyguard and began to develop an obsession with him.
By the age of 31, Disaché settled into a comfortable research position on the luxury space station Oneiros, trying to perfect his cure for mortality, Endless. While in the human space, he discovered the remarkable genetic similarities between humans and Sanier, making them particularly good test subjects for him. Still, development was slow, and after his current benefactors expressed displeasure in his lack of progress he decided a demonstration plus experiment was necessary, and injected several rich clients with the experimental version of Endless. The trial did not go well for the humans, and resulted in a contagious outbreak of varying uncontrollable tissue growth.
Collecting his data, Disaché commanded Aeront to clean things up for him and proceeded to leave the station.
Canon Point: From just as he’s leaving Oneiros after the incident with the current version of Endless.
Personality:
After a childhood of being doted on by his mother and praised by the Enlightened, Disaché is a spoiled brat through to adulthood. He’s incredibly selfish, lacking in emotional maturity, and dislikes being independent. He’s gone through a steady succession of people (his mother, the Enlightened, his Shumel family, his wife, Aeront…) willing to take care of most of his needs from food preparation to grooming that he hates having to actually take care of himself.
Beyond just being selfish, he also has no empathy for other people, making Disaché the absolute center of his own universe. Disaché wants what he wants when he wants it, and has no concerns about whether or not what he wants will hurt anybody. He also holds absolutely no guilt over the many, many people whose deaths he is responsible for, and has no qualms about hurting people to accomplish his goals. Outside of that he doesn’t particularly enjoy hurting anybody (unless they piss him off), he just… really doesn’t care about them. At all. Except where they might be useful to him. He’s learned enough about living around normal people with empathy that he can at least pretend to be a productive member of society. If a rather assholish one.
With his inflated sense of superiority - particularly over other species, thank the Enlightened’s dogma for that bit of xenophobia - Disaché is very smug and often belittling towards other people. However, he absolutely cannot take what he dishes out, and has a quick temper and is prone to tantrums.
Disaché has developed an incredibly warped version of Enlightened doctrine, that places himself as the blessed of the Goddess and God, making whatever he wants right, and discarding any parts of the doctrine that don’t suit his purposes. Being raised by Nunana means he doesn’t care at all about the sanctity of pair bonds or children being born out of wedlock, but he did pick up some Enlightened prejudices, such as the aforementioned xenophobia, disdain for other religions, and distaste for same-sex pairings.
After his childhood near-assassination, Disaché developed an active fear of death - he’s the most important person in the universe, he can’t die - which fed into his general research into immortality and the development of Endless in particular. He is also very particular about the type of immortality he wants. While he could technically achieve a form of immortality by digitizing his consciousness, he would only consider that a pale copy of himself and be deeply jealous of it while still wanting his own brain and body to be unkillable.
Skills:
Scientific Genius, with a primary specialization in nanotechnology and neuroscience, but as a certified doctor and researcher he’s well-versed in genetics, anatomy, and overall biology (including xenobiology). He’s a quick study when it comes to familiarizing himself with new species. Has an A+ in bioweapon development, but he’s not going to put that on his resumé.
Supernatural Abilities:
Due to being exposed to Zircan nanotech from conception:
An innate ability to understand and manipulate Zircan tech
Advanced healing/immune system (not anywhere near, say, Wolverine levels. He just heals faster than average and rarely gets sick).
Samples:
Home
Disaché leans back in his chair, eyes closed to focus on the display flickering across his retinas. His fingers twitch occasionally with minute commands. His computer implants aren’t particularly powerful, but he’s simply comparing and brainstorming for the moment, and most of that occurs within his most powerful tool: the grey matter between his ears.
Working with the Zircan programming is a mix of intuition and trial and error, almost more of an art than a science. Complex colorful patterns dance across his vision, comparing the structure of the programming for his mother’s nanites to that of his latest version of Endless. Things still aren’t quite right. Kidney damage really shouldn’t be met by the growth of an entire functional kidney on top of the original.
He’s busy puzzling out his next modifications to test on the nanites when a blinking red light appears in the corner of his sight, breaking his flow of thought. His upper left ears twitches with annoyance. A message from his oh-so-benevolent benefactor. With an irritated flick of his fingers, he dismisses the notification and blocks any further ones. He’s in the zone.
Or at least he is until the door alarm to his quarters begins to buzz instead. Eyes snapping open, Disaché’s lips pull back from his teeth with a loud hiss and he slams his hand against his armrest.
“Aeront!” he shouts. A slight bristling of fur is the only sign that he’s startled when his supplicant appears by his side. It’s disturbing sometimes how quietly Aeront can move despite his towering 7 foot frame. Refusing to look directly at Aeront, Disaché simply waves a hand towards the entry room and the buzzing door. “Deal with that. I’m working.”
Honestly, humans almost weren’t worth the irritation of dealing with, despite the plentiful resources they could provide. Almost. But for now he has work to do.
Sick Bay
Disaché isn’t where he should be. He remembers being on Oneiros. He remembers preparing to leave. He doesn’t remember anything that would relate to him now being on his back in an unfamiliar room with a distinctly medical bent, with a prickling in his fingers and a throb in his head. He jerks up when someone addresses him, his fur fluffing up defensively. When he’s greeted by a human face, his ears flatten against his skull and he bares his teeth.
This isn’t good, if he’s been kidnapped by a group of humans, particularly after Oneiros - though shouldn’t Aeront have cleaned that up? Where is Aeront? Aeront should be here, Aeront should save him - then things could go very, very wrong for him.
“Do you know who I am?!”
The human woman shakes her head, continuing to smile infuriatingly calmly, then proceeds to explain the situation. Disaché’s fur and ears relax into occasional twitches as his initial panic fades into deep confusion. What Federation? Who calls spacecraft ‘starships’? And most importantly, he thinks as frowns down at the bit of metal in his hand… “What exactly is a transporter?”
Player Age: 28
Character Name: Disaché Amenone
Character Age: 31 (basically equivalent to a human of the same age)
Inventory:
Plain clothing:
- leggings similar to medieval ones plus under-belt to hold them up
- knee-length tunic with belt
- soft boot/slippers
Implanted bio-computer suite, complete with cochlear and retinal implants
Small handheld coilgun with single clip (20 shots) and one rechargeable battery pack (ammo designed to disintegrate against solid surfaces in order to prevent punctures in ship hulls)
Maximum-rated Sanier Nano-hazard Suit
Maximum-rated Nano-hazard containment unit (the approximate size and shape of a small duffle bag)
Contents of bag:
- Dozens of microvials of blood and tissue samples (Human, Sanier, Urcine)
- Vials of inert Zircan nanomachines
- A vial of ‘Red Plague’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Disciple’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Supplicant’ nanomachines*
- A vial of ‘Endless’ nanomachines*
Unaltered Zircan nanomachines in his body*
*details in History
Character Appearance: Disaché is a Sanier, a bipedal species that looks most like a cross between a human and a mandrill or drill. A chance duplication event far back in their evolutionary tree has resulted in them having four sets of eyes and ears (as well as a double-lobed nasal cavities, but those aren’t visible as they have a single pair of nostrils). The upper eyes are used during daytime-level lighting conditions, while the secondary eyes are opened in dim-to-dark lighting conditions. They have small tails primarily composed of fatty tissue.
Disaché in particular is 5’2 and slim. His body fur is blue-black while his skin is pale (only visible on his palms, soles, and face). He has a short, sparse mane for a male his age (which gives him a perpetual teen heart-throb look to other Sanier, but the effect isn’t really cross-species). He has grey irises with dark sclera, and a blue nose. On the left side of his face he has a scar that runs along his cheek and a corresponding notch on his ear.
History:
A race transcended time and space and when it happened became irrelevant. What mattered is that they'd spent the childhood of their species alone. There were no civilizations waiting for them among the stars, no intelligent species to make first contact with. There had only been them and anyone they created. Together - as they were both many and one now - they decided things should be different, and so they cultivated a multiverse.
When a branch bore fruit in the form of a sentient species, they matched it with others that might be able to understand it. They peeled back the bark of space-time and tied the branches together, and where the universes met they put Gates. In this way, the peoples of the multiverse could pass through space and time to meet each other, travelling only years, months, days from Gate to Gate rather than spending eternity searching the galaxy and finding no-one.
To build the Gates they made bodies, composed of countless nanoscopic machines working in concert. Each nanomachine was capable of manipulating matter at an atomic level, as well as serving essentially as a tiny Gate, able to shunt energy from one universe to another. With these abilities, the collective nanite bodies could accomplish almost anything.
Sometimes, by chance space-time event, these bodies were lost, disconnected from the transcended whole and forgotten like so many shed skin cells. One such body fell to the Sanier homeworld and became buried in a mountain.
The Sanier homeworld is a little blue planet orbiting a yellow star along with seven other major planets… and if that sounds familiar, it’s because the planet is a parallel universe twin to humanity’s Earth. Similar in some ways, different than others, intertwined and influencing each other. It’s no surprise then that the name that Disaché knows the planet by - Miva - essentially translates to ‘earth’ or ‘ground’.
While not identical, evolution followed similar wide paths on the twin planets, from single-celled organisms through to vertebrates, fish to land-dwelling creatures, the rise and fall of various megafauna, to the rise of people in the continent humans know as Africa. People spread across the globe, civilizations rose and fell. Saniers and humans both flourished on their own planets.
One civilization of particular importance in Disaché’s history was a tribe of mountain people whose original name has been lost to history. Over a thousand years before Disaché was born, people began to settle the high valleys of the Hyasiv Mountains. Here they began experiencing remarkably long life and exceptional health, healing, beauty, and intelligence. Though remote, the people of the Hyasiv Mountains became renowned in the surrounding territories as mystical healers, known only as myth and legend by some and sought only by the desperate or adventurous.
For centuries the mountain people lived in peace, but a new force arose in the surrounding territories: a growing holy empire who called themselves Enlightened, sweeping across the land with an army devoted to the purpose of converting or crushing every people they came across. When this empire spread to the base of the Hyasiv, it turned its hungry eyes on the mountain people. For the Enlightened, miracles could only be granted by the Holy Pair, Goddess and God, creators of them all. Any supernatural power that existed outside of Them was surely evil and intended to lead good people astray from true Enlightenment. They called the mountain people Corrupted, and did everything in their power to strike them, their civilization, and their name from the world. Only a few escaped the slaughter, disappearing into the surrounding populations.
Outside of cautionary tales, the Corrupted and their miraculous powers were largely forgotten.
Several years before Disaché was born, his mother, Nunana Amenone, followed the bits and pieces of half-erased legend to the valleys of Hyasiv. As a scientist and doctor, Nunana was searching for new treatments, and was drawn to the possibility of miraculous healing. She camped in the mountains for over a year before she discovered the truth behind the myth: mysterious nanoscopic machines saturating the mountain springs. She took the knowledge and the nanites home with her, both in water samples and in her body due to months of drinking the local water.
Her research quickly hit a roadblock. While the machines clearly had the potential to treat illness - encouraging cell growth in wounds, eliminating viruses in infected cells, etc., the nanomachines in the water remained completely inert, and the machines from her own body seemed linked to her thoughts and intentions alone, unable to be manipulated outside of her direct control, making them useless in a wider healthcare context.
While Nunana puzzled over the conundrum of the nanomachines, she decided to have a child. Most Saniers form extremely intense lifelong pair bonds, but not wanting to be tied down with a spouse Nunana instead made a deal with one of her unattached coworkers and artificially inseminated herself. Single parents were looked down upon by the Enlightened-dominated society, but Nunana had little concern about what people thought. The resulting child was Disaché.
During her pregnancy, Nunana put aside her seemingly dead end work with the nanobots to focus on her other medical work and her growing excitement over her developing child. She dreamed great things for her child and in her excitement it didn’t occur to her that the nanites in her body might affect her foetus. It wasn’t until Disaché’s egg was laid and took an abnormally long time to hatch that she began to worry.
Despite his late entry into the world, Disaché was an extremely healthy baby, and it quickly became apparent that he was an extremely intelligent one as well. He hit all his mental development goals far ahead of schedule, and by the age of six he was already reading, writing, and studying the science at an adult level..
Studying him back, Nunana found her nanites in Disaché’s body and began to suspect that they had been influencing Disaché’s development since he was an embryo. Uncertain about what that might mean in the long run, Nunana vowed not to have another child and doted on
Disaché, extremely proud of his accomplishments despite her misgivings, and overlooking the signs that his emotional development wasn’t exactly on track.
One of the things Disaché was most fascinated with was his mother’s nanites. When he was seven, Disaché invented a way to visualize the nanites’ ‘programming’. Too small and simple in design to physically contain data, they had to exist partly on an extradimensional level. At eight, he discovered how to ‘wipe’ the programming that kept the nanites imprinted on Nunana. By the time he was nine, he figured out how to reprogram them.
And that’s when Disaché let the existence and potential of the nanites (almost anything) slip and things fell out of Nunana’s control. The Enlightened government caught wind of it and came for Disaché and the nanite research. Fearing what a zealous conservative government might do with the nearly unlimited potential of the nanomachines, Nunana staged an accident in an attempt to destroy all the research. Unfortunately, without killing herself and her son, she couldn’t truly keep the nanites out of Enlightened hands.
The Enlightened took custody of Disaché and Nunana would have been executed if it weren’t for Disaché being a small child who very adamantly still wanted his mommy. Still, with the Enlightened taking up most of Disaché’s time and watching their interactions closely, Nunana’s influence on him began to wane.
Replicating the nanobot research and replenishing the stock from Nunana’s blood, research into the capabilities of the nanomachines truly began. Manipulating the incredibly complex programming turned out to be something of crapshoot, and it became rapidly apparent that Disaché had a unique intuition for working with the nanites, making this young boy the center of their research efforts. While he had a hand in almost every developed, including the development of antigravity aircraft and artificial gravity for spacecraft, the first thing Disaché truly created for the Enlightened was a strain of nanites that he called Disciple.
Disciple was a first step towards mind control. Injected or ingested, Disciple would subtly alter the Sanier brain to make a person more susceptible to suggestion. Combined with copious propaganda, the Enlightened began to use it to better control unruly populations within their empire. It only resulted in death or brain damage in about 10% of treated individuals.
Disaché became the Enlightened’s wunderkind. Their sacred child sent from the Holy Pair to lead them into a golden age. He was a public figure, basking in the praise and fame. At the age of 12, Disaché was almost assassinated by an insurgent. Nunana hadn’t approved of what Disaché was doing for the Enlightened, but it was the fallout of this that truly started driving a wedge between mother and son. This event also kindled Disaché’s obsession with finding immortality.
Shortly after, the next big event in both Disaché’s life and Sanier history was the arrival of the Seifaan, the Saniers’ first contact with an alien race. The Enlightened did not approve of the Seifaan and their messages of peace and harmony amongst all and their way of life. And as the Enlightened do with all they designate as evil, they decided to wipe them out. And so Disaché’s next great creation was the strain of nanites that would become known as the Red Plague.
Keyed to Seifaan DNA, Red Plague used one of the simplest commands for the nanites: self-replicate. Taking everyone by surprised, the Enlightened launched missiles containing Plague to the Seifaan homeworld, and wherever even a single nanite touched a Seifaan, it would begin to disassemble them at an atomic level in order to replicate. This genocide wiped out over half the Seifaan race and started an intergalactic war between the Sanier and the coalition of alien species the Seifaan belonged to known as the Istiff Alliance.
Their Zircan technology-related technological advances allowed the Sanier to hold their own despite being outnumbered. One of the biggest IA threats to them were Urcine Guardians. After a near-extinction event on their planet, the Urcine had mastered genetic engineering and selective breeding, and the Guardians were the epitome of their efforts to create perfect warriors and protectors, each of them a one-person army. In order to combat this threat, Disaché took a second step towards the creation of mind-control with the Supplicant strain of nanites.
While Supplicant was intended to make the Guardians completely obedient to
The Plague War lasted for three years, and would have continued longer if it weren’t for an incident on the Sanier homeworld where a descendent of the Corrupted accidentally switch all the Disciple nanites in the people around him to ‘self-replicate’ mode. This accidental and undirected Red Plague swept across Miva, devouring everything in its path in a true ‘grey goo’ scenario. Only those Sanier off-planet and those with quick access to spacecraft escaped.
This included Disaché and some of the highest ranking Enlightened officials. However, deciding that the Enlightened no longer had anything to offer him, Disaché arranged for them to be captured. Still considered a child, he wasn’t tried for his part in creating nanotech weapons, but he was still considered dangerous and watched carefully. His only engagement with the Zircan nanites for years was as a long-distance consultant helping the IA unravel the secrets of the nanomachines so they could prevent further Red Plague disasters.
With their planet rapidly degrading, the remaining Sanier were given the choice to join the IA or be resettled on an uninhabited planet. Disaché chose the IA and custody of him was given to a Shumel family (a race of very large, very chill aliens). Over the decade and a half, he almost became a productive member of society. He studied medicine, became a doctor, performed medical research under the ethical guidelines of the IA… and he met a young Sanier woman also living in the IA and paired with her to have children. It became perfectly clear that Disaché’s brain chemistry wasn’t quite right for a Sanier, as he never developed any emotional attachment to his wife.
At the age of 28, Disaché decided that IA technology alone couldn’t give him the true immortality that he wanted, and he was certain that the key lay with the Zircan nanobots that still existed within his body. So he planned and made his escape from the IA to the neighbouring human-dominated systems. Luckily for him, humanity is full of many people with more resources than sense who were more than willing to give him work.
After his escape, an Urcine IA Agent named Aeront set out to find him. Aeront was captured and given to Disaché to study. Disaché took this opportunity to perfect Supplicant, finding it much easier to tailor the mind control effects for an individual rather than attempting to generalize the effects. His experiment successful, Disaché made Aeront his bodyguard and began to develop an obsession with him.
By the age of 31, Disaché settled into a comfortable research position on the luxury space station Oneiros, trying to perfect his cure for mortality, Endless. While in the human space, he discovered the remarkable genetic similarities between humans and Sanier, making them particularly good test subjects for him. Still, development was slow, and after his current benefactors expressed displeasure in his lack of progress he decided a demonstration plus experiment was necessary, and injected several rich clients with the experimental version of Endless. The trial did not go well for the humans, and resulted in a contagious outbreak of varying uncontrollable tissue growth.
Collecting his data, Disaché commanded Aeront to clean things up for him and proceeded to leave the station.
Canon Point: From just as he’s leaving Oneiros after the incident with the current version of Endless.
Personality:
After a childhood of being doted on by his mother and praised by the Enlightened, Disaché is a spoiled brat through to adulthood. He’s incredibly selfish, lacking in emotional maturity, and dislikes being independent. He’s gone through a steady succession of people (his mother, the Enlightened, his Shumel family, his wife, Aeront…) willing to take care of most of his needs from food preparation to grooming that he hates having to actually take care of himself.
Beyond just being selfish, he also has no empathy for other people, making Disaché the absolute center of his own universe. Disaché wants what he wants when he wants it, and has no concerns about whether or not what he wants will hurt anybody. He also holds absolutely no guilt over the many, many people whose deaths he is responsible for, and has no qualms about hurting people to accomplish his goals. Outside of that he doesn’t particularly enjoy hurting anybody (unless they piss him off), he just… really doesn’t care about them. At all. Except where they might be useful to him. He’s learned enough about living around normal people with empathy that he can at least pretend to be a productive member of society. If a rather assholish one.
With his inflated sense of superiority - particularly over other species, thank the Enlightened’s dogma for that bit of xenophobia - Disaché is very smug and often belittling towards other people. However, he absolutely cannot take what he dishes out, and has a quick temper and is prone to tantrums.
Disaché has developed an incredibly warped version of Enlightened doctrine, that places himself as the blessed of the Goddess and God, making whatever he wants right, and discarding any parts of the doctrine that don’t suit his purposes. Being raised by Nunana means he doesn’t care at all about the sanctity of pair bonds or children being born out of wedlock, but he did pick up some Enlightened prejudices, such as the aforementioned xenophobia, disdain for other religions, and distaste for same-sex pairings.
After his childhood near-assassination, Disaché developed an active fear of death - he’s the most important person in the universe, he can’t die - which fed into his general research into immortality and the development of Endless in particular. He is also very particular about the type of immortality he wants. While he could technically achieve a form of immortality by digitizing his consciousness, he would only consider that a pale copy of himself and be deeply jealous of it while still wanting his own brain and body to be unkillable.
Skills:
Scientific Genius, with a primary specialization in nanotechnology and neuroscience, but as a certified doctor and researcher he’s well-versed in genetics, anatomy, and overall biology (including xenobiology). He’s a quick study when it comes to familiarizing himself with new species. Has an A+ in bioweapon development, but he’s not going to put that on his resumé.
Supernatural Abilities:
Due to being exposed to Zircan nanotech from conception:
An innate ability to understand and manipulate Zircan tech
Advanced healing/immune system (not anywhere near, say, Wolverine levels. He just heals faster than average and rarely gets sick).
Samples:
Home
Disaché leans back in his chair, eyes closed to focus on the display flickering across his retinas. His fingers twitch occasionally with minute commands. His computer implants aren’t particularly powerful, but he’s simply comparing and brainstorming for the moment, and most of that occurs within his most powerful tool: the grey matter between his ears.
Working with the Zircan programming is a mix of intuition and trial and error, almost more of an art than a science. Complex colorful patterns dance across his vision, comparing the structure of the programming for his mother’s nanites to that of his latest version of Endless. Things still aren’t quite right. Kidney damage really shouldn’t be met by the growth of an entire functional kidney on top of the original.
He’s busy puzzling out his next modifications to test on the nanites when a blinking red light appears in the corner of his sight, breaking his flow of thought. His upper left ears twitches with annoyance. A message from his oh-so-benevolent benefactor. With an irritated flick of his fingers, he dismisses the notification and blocks any further ones. He’s in the zone.
Or at least he is until the door alarm to his quarters begins to buzz instead. Eyes snapping open, Disaché’s lips pull back from his teeth with a loud hiss and he slams his hand against his armrest.
“Aeront!” he shouts. A slight bristling of fur is the only sign that he’s startled when his supplicant appears by his side. It’s disturbing sometimes how quietly Aeront can move despite his towering 7 foot frame. Refusing to look directly at Aeront, Disaché simply waves a hand towards the entry room and the buzzing door. “Deal with that. I’m working.”
Honestly, humans almost weren’t worth the irritation of dealing with, despite the plentiful resources they could provide. Almost. But for now he has work to do.
Sick Bay
Disaché isn’t where he should be. He remembers being on Oneiros. He remembers preparing to leave. He doesn’t remember anything that would relate to him now being on his back in an unfamiliar room with a distinctly medical bent, with a prickling in his fingers and a throb in his head. He jerks up when someone addresses him, his fur fluffing up defensively. When he’s greeted by a human face, his ears flatten against his skull and he bares his teeth.
This isn’t good, if he’s been kidnapped by a group of humans, particularly after Oneiros - though shouldn’t Aeront have cleaned that up? Where is Aeront? Aeront should be here, Aeront should save him - then things could go very, very wrong for him.
“Do you know who I am?!”
The human woman shakes her head, continuing to smile infuriatingly calmly, then proceeds to explain the situation. Disaché’s fur and ears relax into occasional twitches as his initial panic fades into deep confusion. What Federation? Who calls spacecraft ‘starships’? And most importantly, he thinks as frowns down at the bit of metal in his hand… “What exactly is a transporter?”
