Infopost ahoy!
For a character and fandom that I didn't have to pretend much when writing "as if we haven't heard of it". Because yeah. Taking most of this from my app, so might as well use the same structure:
The Canon
Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren (Jalian of the Fires of the clan of people with silver eyes) comes from the book The Armageddon Blues, by Daniel Keys Moran. The first part was originally published as a short story, "All the Time in the World", in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. When I sold about ten years of back issues to a friend when I moved, I kept only two issues - that one, and another one with a story by the same author.
If you haven't read it and are curious, the entire text is available online and for download (officially!) here. (His other story I kept, which is fanfic and awesome, is here.)
Anyhoo. The story (with quotes from the book):
In the year 2007, there was a nuclear war. Most of the people in the world were killed, either by the bombs themselves, or by famine, or by the weather extremes created, or from the nuclear winter after. Civilization for the most part disappeared for hundreds of years, human society disintegrating into various small groups and tribes.
One group was led by a woman named Margaret Hammel; she was a feminist speaker and self-defense trainer in southern California, and led her group of people into the mountains and down to the sea, where they survived. They grew into a matriarchal society, passing down their knowledge and everything they could keep of the old world's, though it was mostly theoretical, since they didn't have the technology to recreate it.
And then:DATELINE 2052 GREGORIAN.
Marchand the Hunter went into the deep Burns after her daughter.
The child was five Colds, and she knew no better; the night-time glow of the Burn beckoned, and she went. The Clan of Hammel, migrating through the Big Desert by the Waters, pressed on. It was death to enter the Burns. They knew they would never see Marchand again.
Three days later Marchand d’Loria y ken Hammel staggered out of the darkness, past the Clan’s sentries and into the ring of camp fires. Dilann, her daughter, was clutched in her arms.
Marchand died the next morning. [...]
Dilann became known as Dilann d’Arsennette, the lady of the fires. Only one of Dilann’s three children survived to adulthood. All three of Dilann’s children were mutant, as was to be expected of the offspring of one who had survived the banked fires of Armageddon.
The child who lived was a girl, Rhia, tall and fair and strong. Her eyes were bright silver.
Dilann’s grandchildren, every one, had silver eyes.
By the eighth century after the war, Clan Silver-Eyes - ken Selvren - was settled and prosperous. Their eyes were adaptive, in that they could see into a further spectrum, able to note things like body heat and seeing dangerous radiation as a faint sparkle to avoid. Their council of elders, led by the female-line descendants of Dilann - ruled them. At the time the story starts, Morine is Eldest Hunter, soon giving way to her daughter Ralesh.
Ralesh's daughter Jalian, a rebellious girl, likes to investigate the Big Road nearby, certain that the legends are true that at the far end is the land of gods and demons. One day, she finds a "building" on it and goes to get her mother - the building is a spaceship.
The Corvichi are square and lumpy-looking with tentacles, and travel spacetime fleeing from an empire and gathering up whatever they find worth their curiosity. They negotiate with ken Selvren for a place to rest for a while and rebuild some things, in return for which they will share their technology. They also, for those that are able (aka Jalian), teach them to use mindspeech.
This is all the setup for Jalian hijacking an alternate-timeline machine and using it to skip the surface of a timeline that runs in reverse so it kicks her out in her own timeline, pre-Armageddon.
There she meets Georges Mordreaux, the "enemy of entropy". Georges is over 200 years old, and can't actually die. You see, around him, entropy runs in reverse - things spontaneously gain energy and become more orderly.The Camaro ran smoothly, with the sort of leashed power that a jet pilot might have recognized, but which was utterly out of place in a green 1966 model Camaro. (Or any other color Camaro.) Both the passenger and driver’s windows were down, and wind was blasting through the car. The air conditioner was on. So was the heater.
The machine ran ... well, better than new was the term that came immediately to Georges’ mind. Georges did not think that the car would break the sound barrier, even if he pushed it. The car was too aerodynamically inefficient.
Georges had owned the car for two weeks now. He’d bought it from a used-car dealer in New Jersey who swore that it had been driven by a retired couple who simply liked Camaros. Georges had not put gasoline into the car once on the way west.
“Better than new” was probably the correct term.
Georges whistled as he drove. He was not very good at it, and besides, the car radio was competing; the Beatles were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Georges was whistling “Marseillaise.” It did not occur to him to turn the radio off. (To be fair, it is not likely that he could have turned the radio off.)
So - She's a time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future, he's a Frenchman who makes fireflies explode from overactive energy! Together, they try to stop World War 3! Along the way, they hitch up with Henry Ellis and Nigao Loos, makers of the world's preeminent computers/AIs, and a bunch of spies in the US and Soviet Union. (The book was written in the 80s, so.)
The Character
Like all of her clan, Jalian was born with straight brown hair, light brown skin, and features that don't particularly conform to any one race. And silver eyes. She's thin, both by genetics and by the nature of an only-somewhat-above-subsistence diet for the early part of her life. When she skipped across the negative-entropy timeline to get to pre-war times, it partially disrupted her, and reversed her pigmentation....her hair is no longer brown. It is white, ice-white, completely untinted. [...] Her eyebrows and eyelashes are still brown, and it gives her features an artificial seeming. Her skin is extremely pale; she does not tan. Rather than melanin her skin holds pigmentation that whitens under the sun. She is lovely in a strange, erotic way.
[...] Even in the twentieth century Gregorian, her eyes are exceptional. The irises are silver. They have always been silver, of course, but now they are something else and more; a maelstrom of swirling color, silver and blue and pink and purple and green and gold red, that somehow still is only silver when faced with the lens of a camera; the effect is not reproducible.
Jalian’s eyes can and do cause almost instant desire in any functioning male, and in not a few women besides. They are the eyes of someone who has seen too much and knows too much, and knows that there is nothing she can do about what she knows. [...]
Jalian d’Arsennette is viewed, by the twentieth century, as a tall, rather elfin beauty; a woman whom destiny rides like a demon.
She has the strange habit of not meeting other people’s eyes.
She wears her hair long and bound back out of her way. She doesn't have any jewelry (or piercings). She doesn't have any tattoos, but she does have the "warrior's brand" on her left breast above her heart, which all girls get when they become warriors of the clan. (It's the symbol for War - which means it's what usually gets thought of as "male" - the circle with the offset arrow.) As a full warrior of the clan, she dresses in white, and until she finds other clothing, it'll be leather and home-weave stuff. And knives. She usually carries at least three.
Her personality is...strong. She defied her mother at age 6, killed her first human in her early teens, was declared a warrior shortly thereafter (young for the clan) and ran off to stop Armageddon in her early twenties. She doesn't like being told what to do without knowing why. She is extremely stubborn. She doesn't care much for men, though she's not as against them as some of her clan; at one point, one of the aliens wants to teach men to read, and "Jalian held no opinion in the matter one way or the other - except that she was not going to be the one to try to teach the stupid grunts." A man has to really work at it to get her to think of him as a person. Which is probably good, because if a person offends her, her reaction is likely to involve knives. She's good with knives.
She loves reggae and blues (once she finds out about them) and drives like an utter lunatic (once she learns). She's vegetarian - her alien mentor ghess'Rith taught her that all animals have some sort of feelings and presence, and she doesn't eat any of them. She also has been known to play devil's advocate and ask awkward questions in perfect deadpan, just for the heck of it or to make people squirm. She was a wicked child.
The Jalian that's coming to Fandom will have succeeded in her time-travelling a bit earlier than canon version; she's 16, has been an adult warrior for two years, and has come back in time to stop Armageddon...and ended up seven years too late and in the wrong timeline. Oops? (She hasn't met Georges, dang it. Georges is awesome.) She doesn't realize (yet) that she's in the wrong place/time.
Also, she knows enough English to read scientific texts, but she's never spoken it - so, think of it as a Classics professor trying to talk to ancient Romans.
Powers
Jalian is a bred and highly trained warrior-huntress with amazing reflexes, is capable of telepathic speech with other telepaths (or anyone with the capacity for being one), and can see into a wider spectrum of light (at least as far as radioactivity and infrared; nothing more is ever specified). She's very good with knives and good with bow and arrow. She also has training in temporal engineering/mechanics and can/did build a machine to search for and open up alternate timelines. (Not that she has the equipment to do so anymore.)
I have no gifs, alas. I have one icon so far, which actually looks pretty awesome in full size, and pretty badly photoshopped in icon size, so if anyone wants to help out for trade/accolades/etc...?
Also, oof. Large infopost is large!
The Canon
Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren (Jalian of the Fires of the clan of people with silver eyes) comes from the book The Armageddon Blues, by Daniel Keys Moran. The first part was originally published as a short story, "All the Time in the World", in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. When I sold about ten years of back issues to a friend when I moved, I kept only two issues - that one, and another one with a story by the same author.
If you haven't read it and are curious, the entire text is available online and for download (officially!) here. (His other story I kept, which is fanfic and awesome, is here.)
Anyhoo. The story (with quotes from the book):
In the year 2007, there was a nuclear war. Most of the people in the world were killed, either by the bombs themselves, or by famine, or by the weather extremes created, or from the nuclear winter after. Civilization for the most part disappeared for hundreds of years, human society disintegrating into various small groups and tribes.
One group was led by a woman named Margaret Hammel; she was a feminist speaker and self-defense trainer in southern California, and led her group of people into the mountains and down to the sea, where they survived. They grew into a matriarchal society, passing down their knowledge and everything they could keep of the old world's, though it was mostly theoretical, since they didn't have the technology to recreate it.
And then:DATELINE 2052 GREGORIAN.
Marchand the Hunter went into the deep Burns after her daughter.
The child was five Colds, and she knew no better; the night-time glow of the Burn beckoned, and she went. The Clan of Hammel, migrating through the Big Desert by the Waters, pressed on. It was death to enter the Burns. They knew they would never see Marchand again.
Three days later Marchand d’Loria y ken Hammel staggered out of the darkness, past the Clan’s sentries and into the ring of camp fires. Dilann, her daughter, was clutched in her arms.
Marchand died the next morning. [...]
Dilann became known as Dilann d’Arsennette, the lady of the fires. Only one of Dilann’s three children survived to adulthood. All three of Dilann’s children were mutant, as was to be expected of the offspring of one who had survived the banked fires of Armageddon.
The child who lived was a girl, Rhia, tall and fair and strong. Her eyes were bright silver.
Dilann’s grandchildren, every one, had silver eyes.
By the eighth century after the war, Clan Silver-Eyes - ken Selvren - was settled and prosperous. Their eyes were adaptive, in that they could see into a further spectrum, able to note things like body heat and seeing dangerous radiation as a faint sparkle to avoid. Their council of elders, led by the female-line descendants of Dilann - ruled them. At the time the story starts, Morine is Eldest Hunter, soon giving way to her daughter Ralesh.
Ralesh's daughter Jalian, a rebellious girl, likes to investigate the Big Road nearby, certain that the legends are true that at the far end is the land of gods and demons. One day, she finds a "building" on it and goes to get her mother - the building is a spaceship.
The Corvichi are square and lumpy-looking with tentacles, and travel spacetime fleeing from an empire and gathering up whatever they find worth their curiosity. They negotiate with ken Selvren for a place to rest for a while and rebuild some things, in return for which they will share their technology. They also, for those that are able (aka Jalian), teach them to use mindspeech.
This is all the setup for Jalian hijacking an alternate-timeline machine and using it to skip the surface of a timeline that runs in reverse so it kicks her out in her own timeline, pre-Armageddon.
There she meets Georges Mordreaux, the "enemy of entropy". Georges is over 200 years old, and can't actually die. You see, around him, entropy runs in reverse - things spontaneously gain energy and become more orderly.The Camaro ran smoothly, with the sort of leashed power that a jet pilot might have recognized, but which was utterly out of place in a green 1966 model Camaro. (Or any other color Camaro.) Both the passenger and driver’s windows were down, and wind was blasting through the car. The air conditioner was on. So was the heater.
The machine ran ... well, better than new was the term that came immediately to Georges’ mind. Georges did not think that the car would break the sound barrier, even if he pushed it. The car was too aerodynamically inefficient.
Georges had owned the car for two weeks now. He’d bought it from a used-car dealer in New Jersey who swore that it had been driven by a retired couple who simply liked Camaros. Georges had not put gasoline into the car once on the way west.
“Better than new” was probably the correct term.
Georges whistled as he drove. He was not very good at it, and besides, the car radio was competing; the Beatles were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Georges was whistling “Marseillaise.” It did not occur to him to turn the radio off. (To be fair, it is not likely that he could have turned the radio off.)
So - She's a time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future, he's a Frenchman who makes fireflies explode from overactive energy! Together, they try to stop World War 3! Along the way, they hitch up with Henry Ellis and Nigao Loos, makers of the world's preeminent computers/AIs, and a bunch of spies in the US and Soviet Union. (The book was written in the 80s, so.)
The Character
Like all of her clan, Jalian was born with straight brown hair, light brown skin, and features that don't particularly conform to any one race. And silver eyes. She's thin, both by genetics and by the nature of an only-somewhat-above-subsistence diet for the early part of her life. When she skipped across the negative-entropy timeline to get to pre-war times, it partially disrupted her, and reversed her pigmentation....her hair is no longer brown. It is white, ice-white, completely untinted. [...] Her eyebrows and eyelashes are still brown, and it gives her features an artificial seeming. Her skin is extremely pale; she does not tan. Rather than melanin her skin holds pigmentation that whitens under the sun. She is lovely in a strange, erotic way.
[...] Even in the twentieth century Gregorian, her eyes are exceptional. The irises are silver. They have always been silver, of course, but now they are something else and more; a maelstrom of swirling color, silver and blue and pink and purple and green and gold red, that somehow still is only silver when faced with the lens of a camera; the effect is not reproducible.
Jalian’s eyes can and do cause almost instant desire in any functioning male, and in not a few women besides. They are the eyes of someone who has seen too much and knows too much, and knows that there is nothing she can do about what she knows. [...]
Jalian d’Arsennette is viewed, by the twentieth century, as a tall, rather elfin beauty; a woman whom destiny rides like a demon.
She has the strange habit of not meeting other people’s eyes.
She wears her hair long and bound back out of her way. She doesn't have any jewelry (or piercings). She doesn't have any tattoos, but she does have the "warrior's brand" on her left breast above her heart, which all girls get when they become warriors of the clan. (It's the symbol for War - which means it's what usually gets thought of as "male" - the circle with the offset arrow.) As a full warrior of the clan, she dresses in white, and until she finds other clothing, it'll be leather and home-weave stuff. And knives. She usually carries at least three.
Her personality is...strong. She defied her mother at age 6, killed her first human in her early teens, was declared a warrior shortly thereafter (young for the clan) and ran off to stop Armageddon in her early twenties. She doesn't like being told what to do without knowing why. She is extremely stubborn. She doesn't care much for men, though she's not as against them as some of her clan; at one point, one of the aliens wants to teach men to read, and "Jalian held no opinion in the matter one way or the other - except that she was not going to be the one to try to teach the stupid grunts." A man has to really work at it to get her to think of him as a person. Which is probably good, because if a person offends her, her reaction is likely to involve knives. She's good with knives.
She loves reggae and blues (once she finds out about them) and drives like an utter lunatic (once she learns). She's vegetarian - her alien mentor ghess'Rith taught her that all animals have some sort of feelings and presence, and she doesn't eat any of them. She also has been known to play devil's advocate and ask awkward questions in perfect deadpan, just for the heck of it or to make people squirm. She was a wicked child.
The Jalian that's coming to Fandom will have succeeded in her time-travelling a bit earlier than canon version; she's 16, has been an adult warrior for two years, and has come back in time to stop Armageddon...and ended up seven years too late and in the wrong timeline. Oops? (She hasn't met Georges, dang it. Georges is awesome.) She doesn't realize (yet) that she's in the wrong place/time.
Also, she knows enough English to read scientific texts, but she's never spoken it - so, think of it as a Classics professor trying to talk to ancient Romans.
Powers
Jalian is a bred and highly trained warrior-huntress with amazing reflexes, is capable of telepathic speech with other telepaths (or anyone with the capacity for being one), and can see into a wider spectrum of light (at least as far as radioactivity and infrared; nothing more is ever specified). She's very good with knives and good with bow and arrow. She also has training in temporal engineering/mechanics and can/did build a machine to search for and open up alternate timelines. (Not that she has the equipment to do so anymore.)
I have no gifs, alas. I have one icon so far, which actually looks pretty awesome in full size, and pretty badly photoshopped in icon size, so if anyone wants to help out for trade/accolades/etc...?
Also, oof. Large infopost is large!