App for Bete Noire
Name: Saval
Livejournal Username: physicalstimuli
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/95541603/20677027
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Saval is 30 years old, with pointed ears, thin upturned eyebrows, and a shiny black bowl cut. His eyes are blue, and his skin has a faint green undertone where a human might have a pinkish one. He's about six feet tall, slimly built with some muscle definition in his arms, and his features are very symmetrical except for the barely-perceptible crook in his nose. His face is almost robotically unexpressive.
History: Saval did appear in one scene of his canon, as the unnamed teenage classmate of a main character. He instigated a schoolyard brawl by shoving Spock and calling his mother a 'human whore,' and was severely beaten as a result. Further, non-canon history will be detailed in the original character supplement.
Personality: Saval is the kind of person who cares very, very much what people think of him. His sense of self-worth is largely dependent on having people who think he's a confident, charismatic social leader, even when he truly isn't--he'd be happier as a follower. He's an extrovert who hates to be alone, and in his estimation, nothing could be worse than being surrounded by people who don't like or respect him.
As a child in grade school, he worked his way up to the top of the social hierarchy by bullying others, finding less popular children and publicly taunting and verbally humiliating them so as to appear powerful and intelligent. He had a fair number of cronies who latched onto him because they enjoyed the opportunity to be cruel to others, but Saval was a skilled enough social chameleon to make friends among non-bullies as well by acting charming and engaging, and he avoided disciplinary action for his cruelty by manipulating authority figures into believing him innocent on the rare occasions on which they noticed his misconduct. It's often said that Vulcans can't lie, but Saval is very good at creatively wording things when he wants to conceal the truth, and insinuating things that might not be completely true so as to make people believe what he wants them to.
Saval has a tendency to be cowardly, because he's often willing to sacrifice morality for the sake of not rocking the boat and not losing peoples' good opinion. Saval would almost always prefer to do the popular thing rather than the right thing. He knows that this is wrong, and he wishes he had the courage to stand up for his principles once in a while, but he usually chickens out. His habit of falling in with bullies and sadists often gets him in over his head, because he's easily pressured, and before he knows it, he'll find himself doing far crueler things than he means to and then regretting them once it's too late.
Vulcan society is based on the suppression of emotion and the use of logic to solve all problems, and Saval would like to believe that he exemplifies these qualities, but like most Vulcans, it's not that he doesn't feel emotion--it's mostly that he just doesn't admit to it, or express it. When he feels defensive or threatened by something, his response is rarely logical--he usually succumbs to the irrational desire to punish people for challenging him or making him feel unwelcome emotion, rather than thinking it through analytically and keeping a cool head, as a Vulcan should.
Given positive influences, Saval can be a good person. He's painfully aware of his ingrained tendency to be unkind to others, and he doesn't like it. As an adult, he makes an effort to avoid pointless cruelty and to stay away from the kind of people who would make it easy for him to slip back into his old habits. He's grown a bit more of a spine, and he's slowly learning how to stand up for what's right, though he's still in the 'baby steps' phase there.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Vulcans are notoriously puritanical about sex, generally unwilling to discuss it with outsiders except in the most basic scientific sense. As a doctor, Saval is more comfortable with nudity and clinical discussion of reproduction than most of his people, but he is a product of his society. Like most Vulcans, he will insist that he has no sexual needs or desires, and that sex for pleasure and intimacy is a human concern. He has no problem with sex for the purpose of reproduction, but he sees anything else as disdainful and dirty, something no self-respecting Vulcan should want to be involved in.
He associates sex with pon farr, the Vulcan mating cycle which occurs every seven years and induces a hormonal fever which compels the afflicted Vulcan to either mate or die. Vulcans see pon farr as deeply shameful, and there is no stronger taboo in Vulcan society than to speak of it, though it's an inevitable bodily function and happens to everyone. Vulcan culture places a huge emphasis on self-control, and pon farr eliminates that, reducing ordinarily disciplined, logical people to their base, animalistic tendencies. Saval can't help but associate sex with this shameful loss of control, and though he is capable of sexual attraction and has desires of his own, he is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of allowing anyone else, especially a non-Vulcan, to see him with his guard down. He knows his society would frown deeply on his lowering himself to sleep with an alien just for pleasure's sake.
Saval is bisexual, leaning towards homosexual, but he thinks of his attraction to men as an emotional urge that should be suppressed like any other.
Powers: Saval is capable of rendering most humanoids unconscious with a pinch to the neck, though he uses it only in self-defense. He is touch-telepathic, able to hear the surface thoughts of another person given direct skin-to-skin contact, and he can mind-meld for a deeper exchange of thoughts and memories. He's also stronger than the average human.
Reason for playing: I've been playing Saval for a little over a year and a half now. I was fascinated by the Vulcan bullies in the movie because of the fact that bullying seemed like such an illogical, emotional thing to do, and I wanted to explore what the ringleader's motivation could have been and what he would be like as an adult--what kind of insecurity would have made him feel so threatened by Spock, and to what degree he would be able to reform if he came to regret his childhood cruelty later on. The idea of the sympathetic bully is always something I've been kind of drawn to.
I was especially intrigued by the idea of bringing a Vulcan into a setting like Bete Noire, because it's been demonstrated in canon that Vulcan emotion and instincts run deeper than human emotions and can be more raw and violent when left unchecked, and I want to explore what might happen if a Vulcan was brought into a setting that would erode his self-discipline and bring out his darker side. Saval is capable of verbal cruelty, but physical aggression is not his strong suit at all, and I'm interested to see what might possibly happen with that.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: Saval is a fandom-based OC, and he resides in the Star Trek universe, in the alternate reality where Vulcan was destroyed by Nero. Unlike most Star Trek characters, however, Saval is a civilian with no attachment to Starfleet--he lives on the colony planet of New Vulcan, helping with the construction of the hospital and providing medical assistance to his fellow refugees. He had never left Vulcan in his life prior to its destruction, and until recently, hadn't had much exposure to any culture other than his own, as Vulcan's oppressive desert climate made it rather undesirable as a tourist destination for other species.
Character History: Saval was born on Stardate 2228.214 (August 2, 2228) in the city of Shi'Kahr, on the planet Vulcan. His parents were moderately well-respected physicists, and he attended the Shi'Kahr Academy, the same prestigious private school attended by Ambassador Sarek's half-human son Spock. There were quite a few Vulcans who disapproved of this mingling of human and Vulcan culture, and Saval's parents were no exception. Known for being unflinchingly conservative, they raised their only son in a harsh, isolationist atmosphere, teaching him that other cultures and species had nothing of value to offer a Vulcan.
Saval's problem when he first met Spock wasn't that he disliked the younger boy, it was that he didn't. The emotions Spock provoked in him were far more confusing, and Saval's instinctive reaction was to make Spock suffer for forcing him to feel emotion at all. Spock was a convenient target for bullying, and Saval and his cronies made a habit of harassing him constantly, taunting and shoving him and trying to provoke him into losing his Vulcan calm and lashing out like a human. Finally, on one occasion, when Saval was thirteen, he succeeded in getting Spock to instigate a physical brawl by calling his father a traitor and his mother a 'human whore.' Spock snapped and beat Saval viciously, breaking his nose. Despite his initial, emotional desire for revenge, this served as a wake-up call to Saval. He began to realize that it would only lead to trouble to keep surrounding himself with fellow bullies, letting their hateful tendencies feed off each other. After the incident with Spock, Saval began to gradually distance himself from his old friends, and his bullying became less frequent and more subdued.
After graduating from the Shi'Kahr Academy, he continued on to university and then medical school, where he studied to become a surgeon. His friends in med school were fewer and further between than he was accustomed to, and he found it lonely, but it was during his medical studies at the age of 24 that he underwent his first pon farr--the Vulcan mating cycle, which occurs every seven years of a Vulcan's adult life, and which compels them to either mate or die from a massive hormonal overload. Arranged engagements are traditionally consummated during the pon farr, and so Saval married his fiancee T'Paya and the two of them began to build a life together around the idea of Saval's eventual medical practice. After obtaining his medical license, he found a position as a cardiologist at the Hospital of Shi'Kahr and started working on making a name for himself, while his wife worked as a librarian.
Their marriage wasn't fantastic--it wasn't that they didn't love each other, after a logical Vulcan fashion, it was just that they loved each other in completely different ways. Saval loved T'Paya as a confidant, as the closest friend he'd ever truly had, but not as a romantic partner. He tried his best to be a good, traditional Vulcan husband for her anyway, and T'Paya thought it illogical not to just accept that and resign herself. They lived in relative contentment for six years, until 2258, when everything suddenly went completely to hell.
It began with a Romulan mining drill boring a hole into the planet's core. Then came the battle that destroyed all but one of the Starfleet ships that came to defend them, but still nobody knew exactly what was happening. By the time planetary evacuation procedures were coordinated, it was too late. The planet was already beginning to crumble from the inside, and there could never have been enough shuttles for even a fraction of the global population of six billion. Saval was one of the ten thousand immensely lucky few who escaped Vulcan before it dissolved into a singularity, but T'Paya, who was in another shuttle, never made it.
Vulcan's allies, the Federation Council, helped the refugees to find a suitable colony world to begin to rebuild on. Saval, shell-shocked and adrift and suffering from physical symptoms that accompanied the sudden severing of his telepathic marital bond, did his best to provide his fellow refugees with medical attention while a hospital was constructed. His arrival in Bete Noire is from approximately three months after Vulcan's destruction.