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actual tsundere chrysos kineas ([personal profile] devotedtothecore) wrote2013-01-01 12:10 am

Application (Exsilium)

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» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME:
Chrysos Kineas (nicknamed "Chrys")
Character PULL-POINT: King's Year 199, 3 months before the beginning of World End
Character AGE: 21
Character ABILITIES: A professional Engineer, talented and trained in understanding, building, fixing, and taking apart machines, with the quick and steady fingers to go with it. For a human, has a relatively exceptional sense of spacial recognition, internal timing, and memory, as well as years of ridiculous parkour training under his belt. He's also trained (albeit at a basic level) in the use of firearms, primarily for self-defense.

Character APPEARANCE:

Tall human male, standing just over 6 feet, with short blonde hair that a headband usually keeps back from falling over his blue eyes. His facial features would suggest to those of Earth descent some kind of East Asian heritage. Keeps clean-shaven. Built out of lean muscle. Has distinctive dark patches on the palms of both hands and along some fingers from old third-degree burns.

Some sketches (the first has him with a prosthetic arm from a later time in canon, the second one is slightly NSFW): 1 | 2

Character WORLD:

Many diverse peoples, creatures and entities walked the lands and waters of the world of Sabra La Tau; in a world where the touch of spirits, magic and the divine pervaded, those of the southern country of Cepheus stood out for their unique resolve, as old as written history, in adamantly refusing to rely on gods or supernatural sources of power as agents of change in their lives. Ever-enthusiastic innovators, humanists, lovers of knowledge, they grew and built a civilization rich in works both written and mechanical, ever seeking to harness the natural world in order to find solutions for the common man.

By the time Chrys was born, Cepheus was a powerful steampunk-esque nation-state at a technological forefront. Engineering was among the noblest trades. Its cities and towns were powered with steam and electricity, and there were few areas of land beyond them that remained native jungle or plain. A Council of elected representatives charted the path of the country since time immemorial, for it was ingrained that the rule of any lone man would inevitably lead to tyranny over the rest.

Naturally, a darker side to Cepheus was a pervasive antipathy among its people towards those with supernatural abililty, or who put their faith more into "fate" or "the gods" to decide. Viewed with unease or suspicion, they were not necessarily ostracized, but strongly discouraged from displaying their talents or airing their beliefs in public. Conversely, outsiders from lands where such things were a part of everyday life viewed Cepheans as narrow-minded (or outright silly) at times, though there was no denying what they had managed to accomplish.

For nearly as long as he can remember, Chrys has always lived in Corehaven, the capital city named after one of Cepheus's greatest projects; the Grand Core, a behemoth factory/power generation facility built on a scale that itself dwarfed many a town. The Core was likened to the beating heart of the city, as every aspect of civilized life within the city walls-- lighting at every corner, trams running through the streets, the swathes of factories at the riverfront--- depended on the life it provided. To be a member of its crews was a great honor, and they were headed by the best of the best.

Character HISTORY:

A boy with a natural hand and eye for tinkering, Chrys grew up in a relatively privileged household, with his father as a Council representative. His mother was an anthropologist who went missing on an expedition before he was four years old; his father subsequently dedicated himself more to his work than to his son. This led to a relationship more of polite respect than true intimacy between him and Chrys, who found few to relate to or befriend, and began to withdraw into his own world of tools and parts. It didn’t help that most he interacted with saw him only as the councilman’s son, and made him vaguely aware of how his family’s place overshadowed his individuality.

Things changed when he was six, and his father, as a favor to an old friend, took in a child of the same age as a ward and adopted son; a redheaded, one-eyed boy from a nomadic plains tribe far beyond Cephean borders, and a culture quite different from the one Chrys had known. Cian was an energetic, irritating, and unignorable addition to his life, and despite Chrys’s early reluctance, he and “Red” soon became close as brothers, with Chrys slipping into the role of a protective and (begrudgingly) doting elder. Part of this was the unconscious shadow of loss that followed him since his mother’s departure; part of it was the fact that he finally had someone he could call a friend at heart.

When the brothers were ten, an engineer’s oversight resulted in a massive explosion at a key section of the city's pipelines, and what would be known as the Great Fire of Corehaven broke out, ravaging a quarter of the city and taking with it many lives, among them a score of Cepheus's finest engineers, in both the disaster itself and the attempt to contain it. Caught in the wake of it, Red was trapped under burning debris at one point, with Chrys helpless to remove it and free his brother. A timely intervention by adults prevented tragedy, but the fire raged on, and Chrys watched as an event that could only be described as "supernatural"-- a sudden thunderstorm from a clear blue sky, summoned in secret by a priest of an unknown god-- doused the flames, stopping them from advancing further.

The event was enough to leave marks on Chrys as indelible as the burns on his hands from the incident. As he further learned of the scale of the disaster, he vowed that he would never let another opportunity for such a thing happen again, not on his watch, and dedicated himself to doing all he could to become part of Corehaven’s elite engineer corps.

Thanks in part to the shortage in skill left by the disaster, Chrys eventually earned, with his efforts, a place as the youngest Head Engineer on record, leading crews of the Core. While Red eventually left the city to travel the lands, Chrys rarely left the bounds of the city, taking his responsibility so seriously that it was a running joke by those who knew him that he was married to the great machine itself. A near-fatal bout of illness, as well as the gentle (and not-so-gentle) efforts of his friends and family eventually had him easing up somewhat, and certain chance encounters with interlopers from other lands forced open by inches his previously narrow worldview. Though it took a while, and not a little in the way of resistance, found hilarious to just about everyone but himself.

Character PERSONALITY:

Quiet, calm and level in speech at first glance, most who spend more than ten minutes around Chrysos Kineas soon find out the massively stubborn tsundere that lurks beneath the surface. A young man with a strong sense of pride and a carefully cultivated veneer of dignity, he has little patience for what he considers nonsense or frivolous behavior, especially at times when There Are More Important/Productive Things You/He Could Be Doing. All it takes is something to break his stride or set him out of his depth to get him grumbling; those who know him well enough know just the right places to prod for an arm-flailing, red-faced, sputtered retort. (Unsurprisingly, there are not a few people in his life who know him that well enough.) His temperamental nature is only surpassed by his sense of responsibility and duty, and he'll do his utmost to keep the urge to yell at a slacking crew member to a more controlled blunt (if polite) rebuke and a glare.

While he can come across as sardonic and stubborn at times, cranky and short-fused in others, and generally prefers spending his time in the presence of machines than people, there’s a deeper determination and sincerity to him, a consideration for others, that expresses itself more in actions than in words. He's far from misanthropic; though machines and the art of them may seem like his number one life priority, in reality he values the people those machines serve more than the machines themselves. While he himself works long and odd hours at the Core, none of his crew are compelled to do the same except by their own choice, and he is known for discreet gestures of compassion towards them (an extra week's paid leave for a new father, a change of shifts on the roster for a crewman with an ill mother, etc.) His closer family and friends are all the more familiar with the indirect way in which he tends to express his affection, and know that for all the posturing and sparks, his doors are always open to them. He also has a habit of taking in strays that cross his path, whether animals or people, and seeing if he can't find places for them, whether it's a roost for a bibliowl in his personal bookcase or a bed for a vagrant boy under his own roof. All it takes is for him to see something in them.

True anger and distaste he reserves for the kind of irresponsible actions that put others at risk. In the end, for Chrys, to be reckless or feckless is an individual's decision, and while he may find such behavior on the part of others dubious, he respects that people have the ultimate right to make their own choices—but they have no right to endanger others with the consequences thereof. It was a careless oversight that began the Great Fire, after all. Such actions can't help but make his blood boil more than anything else.

He doesn’t do things for the approval of people in general; only the people that really matter to him, and even then at times he is willing to sacrifice that approval if he considers the consequences of his actions to be more important for their welfare.

To Chrys, as with many a Cephean, physics and mechanics have always been more trustworthy than the unprovable or the mystical. While he does not deny the latter's existence or power, he holds a firm belief that there is nothing in magic or the divine that cannot be equaled or even surpassed by what men can build. Still, on a deeper level there lurks almost a fear of those forces he's never quite understood, and cannot grasp; every now and again, for all the wonders he sees in Corehaven, he remembers how easily the Fire destroyed them, and the powerlessness to save even his own brother he faced that day, and how it was only a "miracle"/a caprice of nature that ended the disaster. A miracle that no machine known to man could yet replicate. In a way, his own dedication to honing his machinecraft lies in it being his own form of "power", and one that could be shared easily with anyone; for while magic can only be used by those few "touched" in some way or another, machines, once built, can be used by anyone.

In general, loss of control, being helpless, being powerless are all things he fears on an unconscious level; the moments where he might fall short, be insufficient/incapable when it matters most to him, the fear of facing a dead end and the sinking feeling that “there’s nothing that can be done about this”. The deeper the feeling, the greater the fear inside, and the fiercer his outward rejection of the notion that the dead end exists at all. “There has to be a way,” is a mantra he stubbornly holds to, one that keeps him moving when he might otherwise be paralysed.

He tends towards workaholism, as when he's engaged with a problem before him other things tend to fall out of mind, and tinkering has always been what he's fallen back on as a distraction from the rest of the world. Part of the solace he finds in tinkering is the comfort of it, the feeling of things just fitting into place around him (or him fitting into them), understanding the way they fit together, both physically and on some deeper emotional level he can’t quite put into words. There's also a number of other things he finds contentment in: the company of people he cares about, though he'll rarely admit it outright, and though he may always find something to grumble about around them, their absence leaves a space behind he can't help noticing. Like many a Cephean, books are never far out of reach in his leisure time (more travelogues, treatises and biographies, though he'll take a well-crafted fiction too).

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON:

Chrys's weapon, chosen from the armory, would be a gun similar to this (except more streamlined in design):

http://www.slipperybrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/steampunk-gun_A2E7U_54.jpg

Its function lies in not so much being a gun but a holder of various other tools: a pair of screwdrivers, small wrench, sawblade, plier, knife, soldering iron, lighter, allen keys, magnifier, and various other detachable and modular parts that can be combined into useful doohickeys and tools depending on the creativity and skill of the user. As Chrys progresses in Exsilium, he may regularly add further modifications to it, increasing the range of objects he can draw from it; but its evolution will also result in enhancements to the different parts of the gun to augment the strength or scope of their function. For example, the magnifier attached to it may eventually evolve to a sightglass that, when rotated a certain way, allows him an X-ray view of the insides of an object; the basic tools such as the wrenches and drivers may shift to different sizes and configurations as he wills them to in his grip, and so on.

Character INVENTORY:

- Core Engineer's uniform, a sturdy shortsleeved jacket over a simple mandarin-collared shirt. A patch stitched onto the left sleeve is a symbol of a key crossed by two wrenches to denote his rank. Also wears a strip of cloth around his forehead, and slightly worn metal goggles perched over those.
- A couple of belts and a pair of bracers laden with engineer's tools and parts, including a pair of work gloves and a large, uniquely-shaped key.
- An old wind-up pocketwatch.
- A fist-sized bibliowl that looks like this: http://www.insanejournal.com/userpic/15677007/735352 . Native to Cepheus, bibliowls are generally grumpy but harmless birds with unusually papery feathers and a love for being where books are. This one is not that much grumpier than his owner.
* A small wind-up clockwork bird, wrought in a golden metal. Comes in a wooden box.
- Some local coin and a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes in a pocket.

» SAMPLES
First PERSON:


[ The video flickers to life, presenting a crumbling brick wall that might be from one of a hundred side streets of the city, and a young man, hands at his sides, with a face to almost rival that brick wall in expression. Funny how just a slight bend in the eyebrows and a fraction's narrowing of the eyes makes a difference. He is Not Happy. ]

To those who are called Transports. My name is Chrysos.

[ A brief nod, in greeting. ]

To my knowledge, there have been six incidents in the past two days wherein some form of physical assault was attempted within the city's bounds against members and associates of the Initiative. These were perpetrated seemingly by citizens of Exsilium itself, and ranged from thrown fists to an attempt at stabbing a Transport in the back.

[ He falls silent for a couple of seconds to let that sink in, the only movement his shoulders rising and falling, mouth pressed in a thin line. ]

These six incidents are only those I am personally aware of. If you have encountered such an incident, or know of others who have, I would speak to you regarding the details of what transpired.

[ A glance to one side, somewhere beyond the camera's view, and then back at the viewer again. Intent, as though trying to meet the viewer's eyes through the medium. ]

Unrest yet remains among the people. Be on your guard.

Third PERSON:

http://dramaticshitinlatin.dreamwidth.org/30214.html?thread=13861638#cmt13861638