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[theghostbird]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Hedge
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yes
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE:
CONTACT: plurk: taoofcrime
CHARACTERS PLAYED:

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: The Biologist (AU name: Lena Kane)
CANON: The Southern Reach
CANON REFERENCE:
AGE: 31
GENDER: F
CHARACTER TYPE: Meta-human
APPEARANCE: "The biologist's hair had been long and dark brown, almost black, before they'd shaved it off. She had dark, thick eyebrows, green eyes, a slight, slightly off-center nose (broken once, falling on rocks), and high cheekbones that spoke to the strong Asian heritage on one side of her family. Her chapped lips were surprisingly full for such a thin frown. He mistrusted the eyes, the percentages on that, had checked to confirm they hadn't been another color before the expedition. [mun's note: they are brown]

Even sitting down at the table, she somehow projected a sense of being physically strong, with a ridge of thick muscle where her neck met her shoulders."

-Authority, Jeff Vandermeer


PERSONALITY: Very introverted, The Biologist has been described as "self contained" by the director of her expedition. While she does desire social interaction with other people, she prefers it in very limited doses and is rather awkward with it. She tends to dislike small talk, preferring to get to the heart of people's world views, even while she keeps her own views on most things (besides stuff like mollusc populations) close to her chest. She's capable of larger amounts of socializing, but forced into being with groups for long periods of time, she'll retreat into observation, mentally commenting on the people around her as if they were creatures in her beloved tide pools.

What she does need regular interaction with is nature. It's not in a St Francis sense. She's not naturally adored by animals and she doesn't anthropomorphize them. Rather there's something about the complex webs of natural interaction that calms her active mind and allows her to focus. Without some regular exposure to an ecosystem she can study, she becomes restless and irritable.

This goes hand in hand with her extreme self-identification with her job. She's uniquely suited to the task of fighting back against Area X, which subverts human consciousness via their sense of self, because she submerges herself almost completely in her role. This is why she doesn't mind giving up use of her name on the expedition. Being a biologist/ecologist is part of her identity and has been since she was a small child. She pursued the title to match that, not the other way around.

This scientific background tends to keep her calm in situations that would panic others. She still feels fear and anxiety when in danger but she's capable of a detached assessment of most any situation she's in. Thus despite her lack of natural charisma, she's often leaned on by others in groups she's in.

Curiosity is also one of her key points. She loves anything new and strange. Combined with her social awkwardness, this can occasionally make her seem rude and even intrusive, despite how quiet and shy she normally is. Ghost Bird, her clone, notes: "The first thing The Biologist would try to do if she met me would be to try to take a DNA sample.". If you don't excite her curiosity tho you are unlikely to see that side of her.

Her strong scientific instincts also don't make her totally unethical. She's wary of spreading The Brightness to others, and feels pity for The Crawler, for instance. She may still do unethical things if she judges the gain of them is worth it, but she's still aware of the quandary.

She's capable of forming strong bonds with others despite all this. Despite how miserable her marriage became sometimes, she clearly loved her husband. His emotionality and sociability helped keep her grounded in the world of ordinary people. Finding answers to his death was part of the reason she agreed to go into Area X, a seeming suicide mission. In his absence, she'll probably end up subconsciously seeking someone out who fulfills the same role for her here.

She's also not unaware of how strange all this makes her seem in comparison to ordinary people. Her awareness of her introversion, for instance, is high enough to make her a little smug about it (one could imagine, if the trilogy were written a few years later, her having posted smug memes about being an introvert on facebook). If her oddness is genuinely offputting to someone she'll apologize once or twice (any more and she'll decide they're just not compatible as people and do her best to avoid them).

POWERS & ABILITIES:

CW: This is a somewhat body-horrorish section, especially if you have tryptophobia.

Lena's power can be summarized as symbiosis. She has the ability to integrate any lifeform she encounters, including living tissue, into her body, through ingestion or implantation under her skin, which is more pliable and heals much faster than normal (her blood also coagulates much quicker than normal to facilitate this). Her own system will keep the integrated organism/tissue alive.
The integrated organism/tissues can then be used in a variety of ways. For instance, if she were to implant herself with an adrenal gland she could activate an adrenalized state at will. Integrating a scorpion's tail would allow her to use the stinger as a weapon (IE by having it poking out from just under her skin). Ingestion of bread mold would allow her to synthesize pennicilin for herself. Etc.

She does not have deadened nerves, so this process can often be painful.

A side benefit of this power is that she also has much less trouble integrating cybernetic implants, IE her body is far less likely to reject them.

Currently she is integrated with an organism from Area X (which she got by sneezing in the wrong place). It's a bioluminescent semi-mobile fungus that she mentally calls Brightness. It's granted her the ability to hyperfocus her senses and smell with the precision of a dog and also a complete immunity to psychic and hypnotic compulsion. She's also convinced it wants to spread, which is something she's firmly against.

As a side effect of that symbiosis, several of her organs have glowing fungus which spells out menacing religious sounding nonsense.

Her non meta skills:

-Obviously she's a capable scientist, able to review data, write papers, take samples, etc

-Time in the field and training has made her a capable survivalist. She can live off the land for extended periods.

-She's also been trained in the basics of firearms, though on guns that are, by design, several decades out of date.

AU HISTORY: Lena is a local, born to a working class family that struggled to stay in the mid-tiers through her father's persistent alcoholism. A shy but blunt child, she spent a large part of her childhood observing the ecosystems that would develop around abandoned machinery and clogged pumps. She did not have many friends.

She was a very studious high schooler and graduated early. Her mutation was, luckily, easy to hide, and she did so succesfully well into college.

Her undergrad years were spent on practical fieldwork: mainly, the study of littoral (where the land and water meet) ecosystems, a specialty in high demand as human development began to increasingly expand into the sea itself. She traveled a lot, to many different podunk seashore towns, resource extraction rigs and oceanic domes. Throwing herself completely into her studies, her only consistent non-professional contact with people was the occasional one night stand.

She earned her PHD at 25, a full six years before the median age. It was about that time she met Micheal, the man who would become her future husband and a Zaibatsu military officer. They seemed a classic case of opposites attracting: she being studious and shy, him outgoing and boisterous. They were married after a year.

Things seemed ideal on the surface for them. Certainly there were some personality clashes: her need for solitude and his for connection with others did result in friction that would sometimes erupt into fights. In the worst of them, he'd accuse her of infidelity (untrue) and she'd find a way to eruditely call him stupid (also untrue).
But two years into marriage, he still found her tendency to be found reading in a corner at parties charming and she depended on him to keep her connected with others, something she'd never realized she wanted until then.
This flawed but somewhat comfortable life they'd built for themselves was interrupted abruptly when orders came down from the top: a secret assignment, one he couldn't share even with his closest for the duration. No contact, no nothing. He kissed her goodbye the next morning.

She was unsurprised, though devestated, when the official MIA notice came. What did surprise her was that her husband did show up again...in an alley near their house...staring at mold on the wall.

Something was terribly wrong with him. It was pulling teeth to get him to answer in anything but monosyllables or repetitions of the speaker's own question. Whatever had happened on his last mission had turned him a shell of his former self.

And then he began to cough up blood. He'd barely arrived at the hospital before he was whisked into quarantine, accompanied by menacing corporate security officers. Lena would never see him again.

She hadn't long settled into the unfamiliar process of mourning when an invitation arrived from the top corporate echelons. They needed scientists, esperienced in fieldwork, for a dangerous but lucrative assignment. Oh and PS: your husband was on this one too.

She couldn't very well refuse that. She signed on the dotted line.

Outside of the city, there's a...place. It actively resists incursion. Send an army in? They vanish. Send probes in? They come back scrambled, or not at all. The only way in is with small teams, equipped with old technology.

Inside, something is...happening. Growing. The lifeforms inside show signs of having had wildly different species gene spliced onto them, with unpredictable results. You might find crocodilians with shark teeth.

Worse even is the effect on humans. It destabilizes their DNA, causing wildly unpredictable effects, most often resulting in expedition members transforming into grotesque, half-animal creatures. Mental effects of prolonged exposure are destabilizing, often resulting in psychosis or schizophrenic symptoms.

And that's not even getting into what happened to the buildings.

Area X, they call it, because they don't want it getting a name. It's sitting on a whole lot of natural resources. And worse, it's slowly growing.

(There's a secret history here: the planet's slide into permanent ecological disaster is well known to the elites of the world. Collectively, for though they are ruthless capitalist cutthroats they know when their whole existence is at stake, they sponsor certain projects. One of these was Project Lighthouse: the genetic engineering/splicing and training of metas who can act as living terraformers. A failsafe, you might call it. Recruited from the desperate, these poor subjects were to be slaves, keeping tiny enclaves of elite humanity pest, weather and disease free.

The project failed, as these things often do. Murphy's law and all. The subjects? Noone gave a shit. Even killing them was too much hassle and expense. One of these lost souls was Saul Evans, given the power to induce mutations in organisms by scientists who cared for nothing but the bottom line in their research.

Unfortunately for many people, Saul was already a meta when he was experimented on, a psychic with the ability to amplify and broadcast his own thoughts.

The dangers of this mix only became apparent well after Evans had settled down in a quiet coastal community south of New Gate City. As the latent power implanted in him manifested, it was amplified by his existing power, eventually culminating in his own mutation into the grotesque creature known to expedition teams as "The Crawler". Mutations spread out from him, turning the local wildlife strange and the people of the town...Well, they were not immune.

All the grotesqueries of Area X thus ultimately traced their origin to the fear the rich had of the predictable ecological consequences of their own gargantuan enterprises. So it goes.)

The conditioning to go in was intense, rivaling that of the training for a special forces unit. Toughness from fieldwork and having been married to a soldier helped, but mostly Lena got through it through sheer grit and determination. Hypnotic condition to immediately accept orders was a requirement she didn't expect but accepted. The process was dehumanizing, forcing the members to lose even their own names and refer to each other only by their job titles. She didn't mind.

Lena doesn't speak about what happened inside Area X, but several facts are known:

-She was the only survivor of her expedition

-Whatever happened inside both traumatized and fascinated her. She refers to it in the (even more than usual) flat tones of someone recalling painful memories but her eyes sparkle with wonder when she talks about her findings there.

-Certain words and phrases still cause her to involuntarily twitch: annihilation, for instance, and any phrase combining risk and reward.

-She acquired there a deep resistance to any kind of mental programming.

Nearly a year later, she emerged, with a backpack full of research, claiming that the exit point was blocked off. She never got her pay, but that doesn't bother her. She'd quite literally swallowed her real research.

Now she takes what jobs she can, parleying her ecological knowledge into making gardens that integrate into the homes of the rich and crunchy. It's a living.

SAMPLES

several threads