[application] singularity_rpg
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Siri
OOC Journal: hearyourghost
Under 18? Nope!
Email/IM: hopeforrent[at]gmail[dot]com | coolercouleur [AIM + Plurk]
Characters Played at Singularity: Gibson and Alex Summers
Character Information ;
Name: Ismene | ISS Hesperides
Name of Canon: Original
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: n/a
Reference:+ basic timeline and plot summary here
Canon Point: Just after she gets pinned inside the emergency shuttle.
Setting: Okay, here we go.
The really, really short version of this universe? It's a space opera--but with magic! Once upon a time in the future, humanity packed up their bags, piled into a truly ridiculous number of generational spaceships, and moved off of Earth for good. (Yes, it's all very sad. Unfortunately, Earth just couldn't sustain the sheer volume of people living on its surface, and not even magic can compensate for an exploding population and centuries of ecosystem destruction. Moving to Mars and/or the Moon would have been an option, but if you must terraform somewhere? It's much easier to get everyone off-planet to a place where there's a breathable atmosphere and easily obtainable water.) They headed to a star about 45 lightyears from Earth named 18 Scorpii, which was orbited by planets two to three times Earth's size. The nine planets (well, eight and a double-planet) were named after Greek mythological figures and gods, since why mess with a winning formula? In order, starting from the planet closest to the star and moving outwards, the planets are Apollo, Demeter, Tethys, Endymion, Chiron, Castor-Pollux, Pallas Athene, Eris, and Orpheus. There are also a rather considerable number of habitable moons orbiting the planets in this solar system, and… well, there are too many moons to list them all--31 in total--but they also follow the mythological-naming trend. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it.) Even the sun in this system got a new name; 18 Scorpii isn't very catchy, so it was dubbed Hemera after the ancient Greek personification of the day.
After giving everyone time to settle into their new lives on new planets, the leaders of the generational ships (who were elected by their passengers) decided to get together and form an interplanetary government in order to facilitate interplanetary cooperation and trade! They figured that hey, if Earth managed to have a unified government before everyone packed up and left, it shouldn't be too much trouble to make an interplanetary government rather than an international one! Unfortunately for this plan, 150 years had gone by since people had actually lived on Earth; people who remembered Earth at all were extremely scarce, even taking into account the handful of ghosts who hung around on the generational ships, and many, many people didn't take very kindly to what they saw as an attempt to curtail their newfound ~liberty~. So… rather unsurprisingly, there was a civil war. Three planets, Demeter, Chiron, and Orpheus, and a handful of moons refused to accept the new interplanetary government, and they were willing to fight for their right to party govern themselves. No one expected the war to last very long; the new United government had a better military, more access to interplanetary travel, and better supplies. No one counted on the sheer tenacity of the rebels, and the Insurrectionists were also willing to use tactics and weapons that seriously bent, if not outright broke, the Geneva Convention--and that's not to mention the serious magical firepower that the rebels had on their side. The war was declared officially "over" after 18 years of fighting, but fighting continued sporadically for at least another 20 years, and the United government's grip on power on the former Insurrectionist planets is shaky at best.
Moving on to slightly more cheerful things… magic is A Thing in this universe! At its most basic level, magic is the ability to essentially rewrite the local universe to the specifications set up in the spell. It's kind of like computer programming, really: anyone can do it, given the correct base of knowledge; there are approximately a metric fuckton of methods for performing magic, all of which have their own advantages and disadvantages--and all of which are both technically correct and functional, despite what various practitioners say (seriously, the flame wars about "which language is more precise" and "which setups are most efficient" are absolutely ridiculous); and it's basically a long string of weirdly-formatted words that look like gibberish to the uninitiated and are hellaciously easy to screw up… with disastrous results. Magic has been around and in the public view for about 325 years by the time Ismene comes around, and by this point the existence of magic is pretty unremarkable. It's been heavily systematized and codified over the years, to the point where it almost resembles a hybridized, extremely finicky version of higher-level algebra fused with computer programming rather than any kind of ~mystical~ art. The vast majority of people have accepted the existence of magic as part of their day-to-day lives, and those who haven't… well, they were pretty much the people who elected to stay behind on Earth when everyone else was peacing out. (You would not be wrong if you decided to think of those people as the Space Amish.)
Not only does magic exist, though, but it's also been basically absorbed into technological development! Magitech has become the dominant technological paradigm in this universe, which sort of puts it at a tangent with your average spacefaring universe. Everything still works--which is really all that matters to your everyday citizen in this universe--but the theory behind how things work is usually some sort of unholy Frankenstein of magical and technological principles shoved together into a blender until they're functional. (IT guys and engineers are experts in both halves of magitech, simply because they have to be. Specialists in either magic or technology, on the other hand, are seen as the basic equivalent of theoretical physicists; it's nice that someone is looking at this stuff, and it sure sounds smart, but is it ever going to be useful? Probably not.)
There are also AI! These AI are a little different than the traditional self-aware-computer artificial intelligence, though; they're basically fragments of a dead person's consciousness, complete with personality and emotions (but minus their memories, which is important) shoved inside server stacks, then fused together with magic. For ease of understanding, I'll refer to the hybridized ghost-computer systems as "AI" throughout this app.
Generally, people are frosty at best and actively unpleasant or threatening at worst to AI. There are several groups of people who are strongly anti-AI than most, although the reasons behind their objections are fairly different. The devoutly religious essentially see them as abominations that destroy insert-deity-of-choice's plans for how the afterlife should be. (The existence of souls is taken as a given in this universe, since ghosts are common enough that most people know that they exist. The afterlife is a lot less certain, though, simply because the only dead people that are around to confirm or deny are stuck in the ~mortal plane~.)
A lot of people who worked for the military in support-staff positions aren't too happy with the new prevalence of AIs in large freighters and warships, since the AIs have taken over a lot of their previous roles--and by a lot, I mean a lot. Although most of the AI-run ships kept a skeleton crew of engineers and support staff on in order to make sure nothing goes wrong, most of these people were essentially left to find positions on government ships too small to necessitate an AI, and there aren't a whole lot of those jobs available. Yeah, their entire line of reasoning is DEY TERK ER JERBS. It's a legitimate grievance, okay?
Insurrectionists really don't like AIs, since they basically won the civil war for the United government. The ability to run ships with fewer people onboard than normal allowed the United Navy to put more ships in the air, which meant that they won through sheer numbers rather than any real tactical advantage. The Insurrectionists are just a little bitter about that.
The vast majority of people just think they're creepy as hell, although they're unlikely to ever encounter an AI in their day-to-day lives.
tl;dr: it's space--but with magic, humanity's packed up and moved to another solar system, there was a really long civil war that still isn't over yet, and AIs are actually ghosts who live inside computers.
Personality: At first glance, Ismene is hideously unsuited to being a warship. Politesse, cheerfulness, self-effacement, and diplomacy are good traits for, say, a kindergarten teacher… but they generally aren't traits you look for in a mile-long war machine armed with ion cannons capable of blasting holes in other mile-long war machines. Fortunately for Ismene, it turns out that being a former kindergarten teacher actually has its advantages when dealing with hundreds of young cadets, most of whom have never seen an AI--or even been in space--before. The Hesperides is a training ship rather than a true warship, and Ismene is mostly there just to get the cadets acclimated to the idea of working with an AI. Luckily, she's really good at that part of her job. Unlike most of the other AI in her universe, Ismene retained almost all of her personality after conversion instead of mere fragments, and as a result she's better able to understand and empathize with the cadets on board, despite still being mostly computer. If it's at all possible, she tries to befriend all of the cadets onboard--and if she can't make friends with all of them, she'll try her very hardest to establish a cordial working relationship with everyone. And when I say "everyone", I mean everyone. She doesn't really care if you're a former Insurrectionist, if you're from one of the slightly more batshit religious groups, or if you just dislike her personally; she's going to make absolutely goddamn sure that she does everything she can to try and get along with you. (If it doesn't work, well… at least she knows she tried.) She's well aware of the reputation that AIs have among… uh, just about everyone, and she considers it her job to smooth over any biases that may appear through sheer force of niceness. She's actually been relatively successful thus far, despite a crew that could be charitably described as "fractious"; most of the crew and cadets are at least warily accepting of her presence, and there are only a couple extremely stubborn holdouts left onboard. She won't be thrilled about having to start the whole process over again on the station, but that's the strategy she's most likely to take when dealing with other people in general. Getting angry doesn't help your point, after all.
For the most part, Ismene tries her best to keep things running as smoothly as possible. She appreciates routines, organization, and order… although she's learned to adapt over the years, since the Hesperides isn't exactly a bastion of order. (Keeping cadets around will do that, especially since the Hesperides has a reputation for being the United Navy's training ship for Problem Cadets.) There's another upside to running the training-ship equivalent of Reassigned to Antarctica: Ismene is near-impossible to faze. She's honestly stopped questioning humanity's ability to screw things up for themselves at this point, and she usually skips straight to finding a way to solve the problem--occasionally accompanied by a drier-than-the-Sahara comment, depending on the level of sheer stupid involved. The whole "unceremoniously dumped on a space station" thing? Well… that'll take a little more adjustment than normal, but she'll manage. (Panicking is unproductive.)
When dealing with people on a day-to-day basis, Ismene tends to default to being as polite as she possibly can be during conversations. Part of it is --do unto others and all that--but mostly it's based in sheer practicality. There's no point in antagonizing people unless you absolutely have to, since there's a decent chance you'll have to work with them again, and just because you're more heavily armed than 90% of the ships in the solar system doesn't mean you have to be a bully about it. (She's looking at you, fellow warship AIs.) She's also probably the most diplomatic person on the Hesperides, which just means that she manages to be a bit more tactful than everyone else she knows. but She also has a tendency to understate problems in an emergency--or in general, to be honest. When she says "you may want to take a look at this", it's usually code for "sweet Jesus, the ship's on fire", and her reaction to being trapped inside an emergency shuttle and shut out of the Hesperides' systems entirely was roughly along the lines of "well, this is inconvenient". She's just not the type to panic, and that levelheadedness has served her well on a ship that has an alarming tendency to explode into absolute chaos on a semi-regular basis.
Although she tends to be fairly non-confrontational and extremely polite, she is a warship. She's no pushover, and underestimating her just because she thinks the best way to handle conflict isn't "shoot first, ask questions later" is an extremely bad idea. Her patience has a tendency to solidify into sheer stubbornness if she thinks you're being ridiculously stupid, and once she decides to get stubborn about something? You've got basically a snowball's chance in hell of convincing her to go along with you without using shutdown codes, anyway. Turning stubborn like this is an extremely rare occurrence, and she's much more likely to just go along with whatever harebrained scheme someone else has suggested… but she'll go ahead and make contingency plans to cover your ass, just in case. You're welcome.
The one downside of having a mostly-complete personality downloaded into her systems? Ismene is keenly aware of the differences between herself and the humans surrounding her--it's hard not to be, when you look human but you don't really think like them, and you spend most of your time watching teenagers do all kinds of things that you'll never be able to and she's not referring to sex, come on guys--and although she tries extremely hard not to angst about it? She doesn't remember anything from her life before becoming an AI, and as a result it's difficult for her not to wonder what it's like to be human. She's not as obsessive about it as a few other AI--the freighter who stalked his ex-family until he had to be forcibly taken offline comes to mind; AI might be extremely useful, but they've also got an alarming tendency to be just a little bit psychologically unstable--but she was curious enough to push past the government firewalls and deletions in order to find out what she used to be like. She didn't find out much about "herself" beyond some medical records (including autopsy photos, which she didn't really want to see) and some tax returns, but she was able to find out quite a bit more about her predecessor's widower. (She can rationalize away this particular instance of snooping to herself by insisting that she still feels just a little bit responsible for him--and it wasn't his fault his wife died and got her body taken by the government, after all. Fun fact: boundaries are for other people!)
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Abilities
HACKING AI-to-AI combat in this universe is essentially "who can hack the other guy first", and Ismene's pretty good at it. Although her abilities are more defensive than offensively-oriented, she's more than capable of breaking into computer systems and subtly wreaking havoc or retrieving necessary information.
FLYING Ismene is a spaceship! She's not normally the pilot of the Hesperides, but she's capable of flying it in an emergency--and she does a pretty good job. She'd never replace a human pilot--mostly because she's just not interested; she much prefers system analysis, tyvm--but she's good at getting ships from point A to point B quickly and efficiently.
INTELLIGENCE Having a computer for a brain has its advantages. She's really, really good at data analysis and mathematics, and she can multitask like no one's business.
Weaknesses
INCORPOREALITY Ismene is very much not solid. She can't physically interact with her surroundings unless she's in her ship, and even then her ability to telekinetically "touch" things is very limited. (She also tends to induce feelings of coldness, creepiness, and oh god get it off if she tries to touch people when she's not in her ship--and sometimes even when she is. The downside of being a ghost, man.)
MAGITECH Since she's from a universe where magic and technology have basically fused, her understanding of If something is purely technologically based, it'll take her time to try and figure it out before she can actually do anything to affect it.
HACKING Ismene is a computer with some human aspects, not the other way around. She is capable of being hacked, disrupted, and otherwise reprogrammed, just like any other computer.
SENSORY DEPRIVATION Ismene is used to being a giant-ass spaceship with thousands of audiovisual data recorders. She's not going to have any of that on the station, and until she can acclimate and/or hack her way into some of Hypatia's cameras? It's going to be kind of difficult for her to adjust to being a (relatively) teeny-tiny personnel carrier with no personnel to keep an eye on.
Limitations
Her ship is going to be limited to in-atmosphere flight; if she tries to use the emergency shuttle to either exit or re-enter an atmosphere, it will essentially fall to pieces. In addition, she'll only be able to use her ship's hologram generators--and the limited telekinesis available via those generators--inside the ship. Everywhere else, she'll be dependent on the station's hologram generators.
Inventory: + one (1) seriously battered emergency shuttle
+ one (1) glowy hologram self
Appearance: She's a spaceship! Although she's normally a mile-long warship, at this point Ismene is currently located in a 18-foot, vacuum-capable emergency shuttle (which is basically a VTOL/VTVL craft designed to carry people rather than cargo). These shuttles are designed to survive violent re-entry into planetary atmospheres, so they're essentially built like flying magical tanks. They're not fast and they're not pretty, but everything inside one of them will make it down to the planet safely in an emergency. Although technically the ship is her physical body, Ismene usually interacts with people via her ghost self.
Unlike her physical body, Ismene's ghost self looks very human--if you ignore the part where she's transparent and slightly floaty. She has chin-length dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and stands about 5'6" when her feet are flat on the floor. She's got a dancer's build, and she has a penchant for rather unfortunate floral sweaters. (As an AI, she's exempt from naval rules regarding uniforms.) Her PB is Tuppence Middleton, for reference.
Age: 5
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? n/a
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? Yes!
And What Did You Score? 14 on both!
Samples ;
Log Sample: The Lysithean envoy was early.
The Lysithean envoy was early.
Honestly, the Hesperides should never have been carrying on diplomatic missions to begin with. They were a warship, not a diplomatic cruiser; Captain Yeats, while very good at his job, didn't exactly have tact--or diplomacy, or the ability to carry on a conversation that wasn't somehow tangentially related to the military--as one of his strong suits. (There was a reason he was assigned to the Hesperides, after all.) Unfortunately, the only nearby diplomatic vessel claimed a sudden outbreak of highly contagious Eryneian-strain influenza--Ismene knew for a fact that wasn't true, since the Steadfast hadn't been anywhere near a planet or moon with a reported outbreak of influenza-E for almost nine months, but there wasn't much she could actually do about it--which left the Hesperides as the only government vessel present in the sector.
Really, there was no chance this would end well for anyone involved. Ismene just hoped this meeting wouldn't spark an actual fight, rather than just a verbal one.
Ismene appeared in front of the captain's quarters, tapping gently on the door with telekinesis. After the third knock, which was slightly more insistent than the first two, the door opened to reveal a rumpled, very unawake Captain Niall Yeats.
"Goddamnit, who's on fire this time--"
"Sorry to wake you up, Captain, but they're here," Ismene interrupted, not sounding very sorry at all.
"They're what."
Ismene just nodded, grimacing slightly. Yeats rubbed one temple, and Ismene sincerely hoped there was coffee brewing in that room. (Somehow she doubted there was, though.)
"Tell me you've been giving them the runaround," Yeats said, sounding more exhausted by the second.
"I've been trying, but they're getting, ah. Antsy."
Antsy was probably the politest possible term for it; they knew they were being stalled--and they were already unhappy that the captain of a warship was the lead negotiator on this mission, so it didn't take much for the entourage to get more riled up than usual. It wasn't intended to be a direct threat, but Lysithea had been an Insurrectionist moon, and they were a bit touchy when it came to warships and the presence thereof. (Also, the ambassador criticized Ismene's tomatoes. She was rather proud of the way her heirloom tomatoes were turning out, to be honest, and just because one happens to be from a moon that specializes in agriculture doesn't mean one gets to be rude about it.)
"They're halfway through Hydroponics right now, which gives you almost fifteen minutes before they'll be in the conference room."
Yeats sagged against the doorframe in relief. "You're a lifesaver."
"So you've mentioned," Ismene said drily. "I'll leave you to it, then?"
The door closed in lieu of an answer, and Ismene immediately folded that hologram back into her central processes, making a mental note to take the envoy through the non-classified parts of Engineering after they'd finished in Hydroponics--and to set off an alarm in the captain's quarters once the envoy was officially on his way to the meeting. Fifteen minutes wouldn't be nearly enough time to get everything together.
Network Sample:[HEY THERE SACROSANCT. Two things of note have happened in the past minute. One: a rather large, very armored spacecraft has just crash-landed in the Junkyard. Two: a heavily encrypted ping coming from said spaceship just got broadcast to the network.]
░▒▓█▚▞▗▚▛▛█▓▒░░▒▓█▛▟▛▙▚▞▗▚▞▗▚▛▛█▓▒░░▒▓█▛▟▛▙▚▞▗█▓▒░
[Thirty seconds after that ping--it's not much of a message, just proof that the network is accessible--there's a new ID popping up on the network. Thirty seconds after that--more than enough time to download and scan all of the unencrypted conversations and quickly check for familiar encryptions--there's a hologram of a totally unprepossessing young woman in a very floral sweater broadcasting to the network.
Hello world.]
Ah, excuse me? This might seem like an odd request, but would someone be willing to shoot at me very quickly? It won't take more than a minute of your time, I promise.
[No United Navy personnel present, a distinct lack of anyone using encryptions that even vaguely resemble anything she's familiar with, and locked controls on her spaceship? Time for Plan B.]
Your Nickname: Siri
OOC Journal: hearyourghost
Under 18? Nope!
Email/IM: hopeforrent[at]gmail[dot]com | coolercouleur [AIM + Plurk]
Characters Played at Singularity: Gibson and Alex Summers
Character Information ;
Name: Ismene | ISS Hesperides
Name of Canon: Original
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: n/a
Reference:+ basic timeline and plot summary here
Canon Point: Just after she gets pinned inside the emergency shuttle.
Setting: Okay, here we go.
The really, really short version of this universe? It's a space opera--but with magic! Once upon a time in the future, humanity packed up their bags, piled into a truly ridiculous number of generational spaceships, and moved off of Earth for good. (Yes, it's all very sad. Unfortunately, Earth just couldn't sustain the sheer volume of people living on its surface, and not even magic can compensate for an exploding population and centuries of ecosystem destruction. Moving to Mars and/or the Moon would have been an option, but if you must terraform somewhere? It's much easier to get everyone off-planet to a place where there's a breathable atmosphere and easily obtainable water.) They headed to a star about 45 lightyears from Earth named 18 Scorpii, which was orbited by planets two to three times Earth's size. The nine planets (well, eight and a double-planet) were named after Greek mythological figures and gods, since why mess with a winning formula? In order, starting from the planet closest to the star and moving outwards, the planets are Apollo, Demeter, Tethys, Endymion, Chiron, Castor-Pollux, Pallas Athene, Eris, and Orpheus. There are also a rather considerable number of habitable moons orbiting the planets in this solar system, and… well, there are too many moons to list them all--31 in total--but they also follow the mythological-naming trend. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it.) Even the sun in this system got a new name; 18 Scorpii isn't very catchy, so it was dubbed Hemera after the ancient Greek personification of the day.
After giving everyone time to settle into their new lives on new planets, the leaders of the generational ships (who were elected by their passengers) decided to get together and form an interplanetary government in order to facilitate interplanetary cooperation and trade! They figured that hey, if Earth managed to have a unified government before everyone packed up and left, it shouldn't be too much trouble to make an interplanetary government rather than an international one! Unfortunately for this plan, 150 years had gone by since people had actually lived on Earth; people who remembered Earth at all were extremely scarce, even taking into account the handful of ghosts who hung around on the generational ships, and many, many people didn't take very kindly to what they saw as an attempt to curtail their newfound ~liberty~. So… rather unsurprisingly, there was a civil war. Three planets, Demeter, Chiron, and Orpheus, and a handful of moons refused to accept the new interplanetary government, and they were willing to fight for their right to party govern themselves. No one expected the war to last very long; the new United government had a better military, more access to interplanetary travel, and better supplies. No one counted on the sheer tenacity of the rebels, and the Insurrectionists were also willing to use tactics and weapons that seriously bent, if not outright broke, the Geneva Convention--and that's not to mention the serious magical firepower that the rebels had on their side. The war was declared officially "over" after 18 years of fighting, but fighting continued sporadically for at least another 20 years, and the United government's grip on power on the former Insurrectionist planets is shaky at best.
Moving on to slightly more cheerful things… magic is A Thing in this universe! At its most basic level, magic is the ability to essentially rewrite the local universe to the specifications set up in the spell. It's kind of like computer programming, really: anyone can do it, given the correct base of knowledge; there are approximately a metric fuckton of methods for performing magic, all of which have their own advantages and disadvantages--and all of which are both technically correct and functional, despite what various practitioners say (seriously, the flame wars about "which language is more precise" and "which setups are most efficient" are absolutely ridiculous); and it's basically a long string of weirdly-formatted words that look like gibberish to the uninitiated and are hellaciously easy to screw up… with disastrous results. Magic has been around and in the public view for about 325 years by the time Ismene comes around, and by this point the existence of magic is pretty unremarkable. It's been heavily systematized and codified over the years, to the point where it almost resembles a hybridized, extremely finicky version of higher-level algebra fused with computer programming rather than any kind of ~mystical~ art. The vast majority of people have accepted the existence of magic as part of their day-to-day lives, and those who haven't… well, they were pretty much the people who elected to stay behind on Earth when everyone else was peacing out. (You would not be wrong if you decided to think of those people as the Space Amish.)
Not only does magic exist, though, but it's also been basically absorbed into technological development! Magitech has become the dominant technological paradigm in this universe, which sort of puts it at a tangent with your average spacefaring universe. Everything still works--which is really all that matters to your everyday citizen in this universe--but the theory behind how things work is usually some sort of unholy Frankenstein of magical and technological principles shoved together into a blender until they're functional. (IT guys and engineers are experts in both halves of magitech, simply because they have to be. Specialists in either magic or technology, on the other hand, are seen as the basic equivalent of theoretical physicists; it's nice that someone is looking at this stuff, and it sure sounds smart, but is it ever going to be useful? Probably not.)
There are also AI! These AI are a little different than the traditional self-aware-computer artificial intelligence, though; they're basically fragments of a dead person's consciousness, complete with personality and emotions (but minus their memories, which is important) shoved inside server stacks, then fused together with magic. For ease of understanding, I'll refer to the hybridized ghost-computer systems as "AI" throughout this app.
Generally, people are frosty at best and actively unpleasant or threatening at worst to AI. There are several groups of people who are strongly anti-AI than most, although the reasons behind their objections are fairly different. The devoutly religious essentially see them as abominations that destroy insert-deity-of-choice's plans for how the afterlife should be. (The existence of souls is taken as a given in this universe, since ghosts are common enough that most people know that they exist. The afterlife is a lot less certain, though, simply because the only dead people that are around to confirm or deny are stuck in the ~mortal plane~.)
A lot of people who worked for the military in support-staff positions aren't too happy with the new prevalence of AIs in large freighters and warships, since the AIs have taken over a lot of their previous roles--and by a lot, I mean a lot. Although most of the AI-run ships kept a skeleton crew of engineers and support staff on in order to make sure nothing goes wrong, most of these people were essentially left to find positions on government ships too small to necessitate an AI, and there aren't a whole lot of those jobs available. Yeah, their entire line of reasoning is DEY TERK ER JERBS. It's a legitimate grievance, okay?
Insurrectionists really don't like AIs, since they basically won the civil war for the United government. The ability to run ships with fewer people onboard than normal allowed the United Navy to put more ships in the air, which meant that they won through sheer numbers rather than any real tactical advantage. The Insurrectionists are just a little bitter about that.
The vast majority of people just think they're creepy as hell, although they're unlikely to ever encounter an AI in their day-to-day lives.
tl;dr: it's space--but with magic, humanity's packed up and moved to another solar system, there was a really long civil war that still isn't over yet, and AIs are actually ghosts who live inside computers.
Personality: At first glance, Ismene is hideously unsuited to being a warship. Politesse, cheerfulness, self-effacement, and diplomacy are good traits for, say, a kindergarten teacher… but they generally aren't traits you look for in a mile-long war machine armed with ion cannons capable of blasting holes in other mile-long war machines. Fortunately for Ismene, it turns out that being a former kindergarten teacher actually has its advantages when dealing with hundreds of young cadets, most of whom have never seen an AI--or even been in space--before. The Hesperides is a training ship rather than a true warship, and Ismene is mostly there just to get the cadets acclimated to the idea of working with an AI. Luckily, she's really good at that part of her job. Unlike most of the other AI in her universe, Ismene retained almost all of her personality after conversion instead of mere fragments, and as a result she's better able to understand and empathize with the cadets on board, despite still being mostly computer. If it's at all possible, she tries to befriend all of the cadets onboard--and if she can't make friends with all of them, she'll try her very hardest to establish a cordial working relationship with everyone. And when I say "everyone", I mean everyone. She doesn't really care if you're a former Insurrectionist, if you're from one of the slightly more batshit religious groups, or if you just dislike her personally; she's going to make absolutely goddamn sure that she does everything she can to try and get along with you. (If it doesn't work, well… at least she knows she tried.) She's well aware of the reputation that AIs have among… uh, just about everyone, and she considers it her job to smooth over any biases that may appear through sheer force of niceness. She's actually been relatively successful thus far, despite a crew that could be charitably described as "fractious"; most of the crew and cadets are at least warily accepting of her presence, and there are only a couple extremely stubborn holdouts left onboard. She won't be thrilled about having to start the whole process over again on the station, but that's the strategy she's most likely to take when dealing with other people in general. Getting angry doesn't help your point, after all.
For the most part, Ismene tries her best to keep things running as smoothly as possible. She appreciates routines, organization, and order… although she's learned to adapt over the years, since the Hesperides isn't exactly a bastion of order. (Keeping cadets around will do that, especially since the Hesperides has a reputation for being the United Navy's training ship for Problem Cadets.) There's another upside to running the training-ship equivalent of Reassigned to Antarctica: Ismene is near-impossible to faze. She's honestly stopped questioning humanity's ability to screw things up for themselves at this point, and she usually skips straight to finding a way to solve the problem--occasionally accompanied by a drier-than-the-Sahara comment, depending on the level of sheer stupid involved. The whole "unceremoniously dumped on a space station" thing? Well… that'll take a little more adjustment than normal, but she'll manage. (Panicking is unproductive.)
When dealing with people on a day-to-day basis, Ismene tends to default to being as polite as she possibly can be during conversations. Part of it is --do unto others and all that--but mostly it's based in sheer practicality. There's no point in antagonizing people unless you absolutely have to, since there's a decent chance you'll have to work with them again, and just because you're more heavily armed than 90% of the ships in the solar system doesn't mean you have to be a bully about it. (She's looking at you, fellow warship AIs.) She's also probably the most diplomatic person on the Hesperides, which just means that she manages to be a bit more tactful than everyone else she knows. but She also has a tendency to understate problems in an emergency--or in general, to be honest. When she says "you may want to take a look at this", it's usually code for "sweet Jesus, the ship's on fire", and her reaction to being trapped inside an emergency shuttle and shut out of the Hesperides' systems entirely was roughly along the lines of "well, this is inconvenient". She's just not the type to panic, and that levelheadedness has served her well on a ship that has an alarming tendency to explode into absolute chaos on a semi-regular basis.
Although she tends to be fairly non-confrontational and extremely polite, she is a warship. She's no pushover, and underestimating her just because she thinks the best way to handle conflict isn't "shoot first, ask questions later" is an extremely bad idea. Her patience has a tendency to solidify into sheer stubbornness if she thinks you're being ridiculously stupid, and once she decides to get stubborn about something? You've got basically a snowball's chance in hell of convincing her to go along with you without using shutdown codes, anyway. Turning stubborn like this is an extremely rare occurrence, and she's much more likely to just go along with whatever harebrained scheme someone else has suggested… but she'll go ahead and make contingency plans to cover your ass, just in case. You're welcome.
The one downside of having a mostly-complete personality downloaded into her systems? Ismene is keenly aware of the differences between herself and the humans surrounding her--it's hard not to be, when you look human but you don't really think like them, and you spend most of your time watching teenagers do all kinds of things that you'll never be able to and she's not referring to sex, come on guys--and although she tries extremely hard not to angst about it? She doesn't remember anything from her life before becoming an AI, and as a result it's difficult for her not to wonder what it's like to be human. She's not as obsessive about it as a few other AI--the freighter who stalked his ex-family until he had to be forcibly taken offline comes to mind; AI might be extremely useful, but they've also got an alarming tendency to be just a little bit psychologically unstable--but she was curious enough to push past the government firewalls and deletions in order to find out what she used to be like. She didn't find out much about "herself" beyond some medical records (including autopsy photos, which she didn't really want to see) and some tax returns, but she was able to find out quite a bit more about her predecessor's widower. (She can rationalize away this particular instance of snooping to herself by insisting that she still feels just a little bit responsible for him--and it wasn't his fault his wife died and got her body taken by the government, after all. Fun fact: boundaries are for other people!)
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Abilities
HACKING AI-to-AI combat in this universe is essentially "who can hack the other guy first", and Ismene's pretty good at it. Although her abilities are more defensive than offensively-oriented, she's more than capable of breaking into computer systems and subtly wreaking havoc or retrieving necessary information.
FLYING Ismene is a spaceship! She's not normally the pilot of the Hesperides, but she's capable of flying it in an emergency--and she does a pretty good job. She'd never replace a human pilot--mostly because she's just not interested; she much prefers system analysis, tyvm--but she's good at getting ships from point A to point B quickly and efficiently.
INTELLIGENCE Having a computer for a brain has its advantages. She's really, really good at data analysis and mathematics, and she can multitask like no one's business.
Weaknesses
INCORPOREALITY Ismene is very much not solid. She can't physically interact with her surroundings unless she's in her ship, and even then her ability to telekinetically "touch" things is very limited. (She also tends to induce feelings of coldness, creepiness, and oh god get it off if she tries to touch people when she's not in her ship--and sometimes even when she is. The downside of being a ghost, man.)
MAGITECH Since she's from a universe where magic and technology have basically fused, her understanding of If something is purely technologically based, it'll take her time to try and figure it out before she can actually do anything to affect it.
HACKING Ismene is a computer with some human aspects, not the other way around. She is capable of being hacked, disrupted, and otherwise reprogrammed, just like any other computer.
SENSORY DEPRIVATION Ismene is used to being a giant-ass spaceship with thousands of audiovisual data recorders. She's not going to have any of that on the station, and until she can acclimate and/or hack her way into some of Hypatia's cameras? It's going to be kind of difficult for her to adjust to being a (relatively) teeny-tiny personnel carrier with no personnel to keep an eye on.
Limitations
Her ship is going to be limited to in-atmosphere flight; if she tries to use the emergency shuttle to either exit or re-enter an atmosphere, it will essentially fall to pieces. In addition, she'll only be able to use her ship's hologram generators--and the limited telekinesis available via those generators--inside the ship. Everywhere else, she'll be dependent on the station's hologram generators.
Inventory: + one (1) seriously battered emergency shuttle
+ one (1) glowy hologram self
Appearance: She's a spaceship! Although she's normally a mile-long warship, at this point Ismene is currently located in a 18-foot, vacuum-capable emergency shuttle (which is basically a VTOL/VTVL craft designed to carry people rather than cargo). These shuttles are designed to survive violent re-entry into planetary atmospheres, so they're essentially built like flying magical tanks. They're not fast and they're not pretty, but everything inside one of them will make it down to the planet safely in an emergency. Although technically the ship is her physical body, Ismene usually interacts with people via her ghost self.
Unlike her physical body, Ismene's ghost self looks very human--if you ignore the part where she's transparent and slightly floaty. She has chin-length dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and stands about 5'6" when her feet are flat on the floor. She's got a dancer's build, and she has a penchant for rather unfortunate floral sweaters. (As an AI, she's exempt from naval rules regarding uniforms.) Her PB is Tuppence Middleton, for reference.
Age: 5
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? n/a
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? Yes!
And What Did You Score? 14 on both!
Samples ;
Log Sample: The Lysithean envoy was early.
The Lysithean envoy was early.
Honestly, the Hesperides should never have been carrying on diplomatic missions to begin with. They were a warship, not a diplomatic cruiser; Captain Yeats, while very good at his job, didn't exactly have tact--or diplomacy, or the ability to carry on a conversation that wasn't somehow tangentially related to the military--as one of his strong suits. (There was a reason he was assigned to the Hesperides, after all.) Unfortunately, the only nearby diplomatic vessel claimed a sudden outbreak of highly contagious Eryneian-strain influenza--Ismene knew for a fact that wasn't true, since the Steadfast hadn't been anywhere near a planet or moon with a reported outbreak of influenza-E for almost nine months, but there wasn't much she could actually do about it--which left the Hesperides as the only government vessel present in the sector.
Really, there was no chance this would end well for anyone involved. Ismene just hoped this meeting wouldn't spark an actual fight, rather than just a verbal one.
Ismene appeared in front of the captain's quarters, tapping gently on the door with telekinesis. After the third knock, which was slightly more insistent than the first two, the door opened to reveal a rumpled, very unawake Captain Niall Yeats.
"Goddamnit, who's on fire this time--"
"Sorry to wake you up, Captain, but they're here," Ismene interrupted, not sounding very sorry at all.
"They're what."
Ismene just nodded, grimacing slightly. Yeats rubbed one temple, and Ismene sincerely hoped there was coffee brewing in that room. (Somehow she doubted there was, though.)
"Tell me you've been giving them the runaround," Yeats said, sounding more exhausted by the second.
"I've been trying, but they're getting, ah. Antsy."
Antsy was probably the politest possible term for it; they knew they were being stalled--and they were already unhappy that the captain of a warship was the lead negotiator on this mission, so it didn't take much for the entourage to get more riled up than usual. It wasn't intended to be a direct threat, but Lysithea had been an Insurrectionist moon, and they were a bit touchy when it came to warships and the presence thereof. (Also, the ambassador criticized Ismene's tomatoes. She was rather proud of the way her heirloom tomatoes were turning out, to be honest, and just because one happens to be from a moon that specializes in agriculture doesn't mean one gets to be rude about it.)
"They're halfway through Hydroponics right now, which gives you almost fifteen minutes before they'll be in the conference room."
Yeats sagged against the doorframe in relief. "You're a lifesaver."
"So you've mentioned," Ismene said drily. "I'll leave you to it, then?"
The door closed in lieu of an answer, and Ismene immediately folded that hologram back into her central processes, making a mental note to take the envoy through the non-classified parts of Engineering after they'd finished in Hydroponics--and to set off an alarm in the captain's quarters once the envoy was officially on his way to the meeting. Fifteen minutes wouldn't be nearly enough time to get everything together.
Network Sample:[HEY THERE SACROSANCT. Two things of note have happened in the past minute. One: a rather large, very armored spacecraft has just crash-landed in the Junkyard. Two: a heavily encrypted ping coming from said spaceship just got broadcast to the network.]
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[Thirty seconds after that ping--it's not much of a message, just proof that the network is accessible--there's a new ID popping up on the network. Thirty seconds after that--more than enough time to download and scan all of the unencrypted conversations and quickly check for familiar encryptions--there's a hologram of a totally unprepossessing young woman in a very floral sweater broadcasting to the network.
Hello world.]
Ah, excuse me? This might seem like an odd request, but would someone be willing to shoot at me very quickly? It won't take more than a minute of your time, I promise.
[No United Navy personnel present, a distinct lack of anyone using encryptions that even vaguely resemble anything she's familiar with, and locked controls on her spaceship? Time for Plan B.]