PLAYER INFO

Name: Su
Age: Enough
Time Zone: Pacific
Contact Information: anagramarye @ AIM, anagramarye, sumanity
Other Characters Played: n/a

CHARACTER INFO

Name: Nimuwiil (that feeling you get when something suddenly has your attention but you’re not completely sure why)

(Yes, the whole thing is his name, but feel free to leave off the bit in parentheses for listing stuff.)

Canon: Original character, based on the Sword of the Stars series

Age: 78

Appearance:

Nimuwiil looks something like a Terrestrial cetacean; at about six meters from nose to tail and weighing a few hundred kilograms, he could be taken at first glance as something like a particularly large dolphin or a very small orca whale, albeit one of an unknown breed. Unlike any terrestrial cetacean, though, he has secondary flukes and fins and a set of short but powerful grasper tentacles that fringe his short snout. His blue-gray hide is covered in sleek fur and patterns of softly glowing “tattoos” (actually symbiotic microorganisms).

References:

• proportions
• spacesuit
• unsuited

History:

Nimuwiil spent his childhood as most modern Liir do: years spent playing in the shallows with his peers, being taught by visiting elders and Elders, learning the skills of Liir life and honing his psychic abilities. For much of his youth, he had only the vaguest idea of knowledge of other worlds and species. On Muur, the Liir homeworld, war seemed a distant and easily-avoided thought, and the easy bounty of the sea and the protection of the Elders insulated him from real hardship.

He was a curious child, though, and unlike his peers, fascinated with the strange art of steelsinging, by which a Liir could shape and work metal with mental effort alone. It was a sharp contrast with his pastoral upbringing (an upbringing that, unbeknownst to him at the time, was a legacy of the Liirian pretechnological age, only a few hundred years before), and by the time he was only halfway adult he’d pseudo-apprenticed himself to an adult steelsinger had and even made a number of intricate (if ultimately not-so-useful) clockwork inventions.

It was by sheer accident that he encountered one of the Black Swimmers, some years later. With his teacher busy with things she refused to talk about, and nothing to do but prank his podmates or toy with steelsung puzzle-books he’d solved days before, he went to follow her. He hid his mind from teacher, up on land to the little meeting-base she’d gone to, but when he found her there with an armored Liir who reeked of pain and fear of a kind and intensity he’d never felt before, he turned tail and fled as fast as he could to deep waters.

With his budding career abandoned—and his heart broken by the realization his beloved teacher herself loved someone whose very presence was pain—Nimuwiil took to aimless wandering from Elder to Elder, moving on when each refused to educate him about what he’d discovered. Finally, some months later, he found one, scarred and with a mind more hidden than any he’d met before, more bemused than offended by the request. The Elder would educate him… if he could win a game of “hide-the-thought”. The game was simple: get through the Elder’s mental defenses and find the thought he was hiding.

It took Nimuwiil five years, trying over and over at the Elder’s most vulnerable moments. During that time—during which Nimuwiil had come of age to be recognized as an adult—the Elder taught him strange philosophies, unusual methods of steelsinging, and many things about the greater universe that were benign on their face but that he’d never known before. Finally, he won, and in a moment of clarity he found the memory driving the great interstellar war machine of his species: that in the oldest history of the Liir, their own Great Elders had gone mad, over and over, wicked and sociopathically vicious, and had ventured into space to inflict their cruelties on other species.

That moment shocked and brutalized him, and when he had recovered, Nimuwiil desperately begged the Elder for anything he could do to help. He understood that he had been groomed for it, of course, but embraced in the depths of the Elder’s regret, he couldn’t be angry about it. The training that followed, to which his last education had been a prelude, was efficient, intense, and painful. His Drowning Day, when he first breathed the oxygenated fluid used on Liir ships and officially joined the ranks of the Black Swimmers, was worse—even before the raw and scarring trauma of the “drowning” itself, he could only barely manage to speak to his friends before leaving, and avoided his old steelsinging teacher completely for fear of hurting her even more.

Nimuwiil did better at first than most recruits of the Black Swimmers: his quick aptitude for technology got him quickly assigned to one of the increasing number of Liir scout ships… and from there his first taste of brutality when his ship was one of a number pulled into a hastily-formed armada sent to strategically destroy an alien colonization fleet. He performed better than expected: when his ship’s Elder was temporarily incapacitated by unlucky damage to the ship, he assumed command, driving a small but important pinprick of distraction into the enemy fleet.

He also killed many of the alien civilians in the process, and the impotent self-loathing that followed was not unexpected by his superiors. Under the ministrations of the Prester Zuul—an allied species with the ability to consume memories, with their priest-counselors called Sin-Eaters—he slowly recovered and returned to service. Trusted to handle himself in combat (and seen as no worse in its aftermath than many Liir), he was moved from the scouting service to subcommand duties on a cruiser vessel.

From there, in the midst of a period of war on all sides and with multiple species, Nimuwiil was part of a number of large conflicts, each leaving its own scars. War is, as they say, a game for the young, and though only twenty years had passed (not very long at all in the long lifespan of a Liir), he felt very old indeed.

Fortunately for him, peace decided to break out at that point. As an attempted prelude to a more lasting peace, the Liir had decided to allow a single ship of peaceful outsiders, crewed by multiple species, to visit their homeworld. Nimuwiil’s vessel was assigned to them as a guard… and, if necessary, executioner.

Canon Point: Nimuwiil’s current point is from just before the first organization alien visitation to his world, at about the year 2483 in the Sword of the Stars timeline. (I may ask to adjust the exact timing later if I get my hands on more SotS lore material, since assembling a sensible timeline out of the lore is like putting a puzzle together.)

Personality:

At first approach, Nimuwiil would seem like a “gentle giant”: despite being an apex predator physically and having potentially terrifying psychic power, he would never willingly harm an innocent… as long as he didn’t think it was necessary. The “necessary” part isn’t nearly so obvious, for though he’s a soldier of his people Nimuwiil’s first reaction to a stressful situation would almost never be violence, even if someone were actively shooting at him. The combination of his psychic abilities and his upbringing make it near-impossible for him to dehumanize someone in the way that a soldier of another species would: every injury he inflicts, every death he causes, is as psychologically up-close and personal to him as it would be for a normal human forced to harm a close relative.

Nimuwiil doesn’t actively hide that he has done what are (at least to him) terrible things, but neither does he bring them up if he can avoid it. He is, in a deep and lasting way, ashamed of himself for being a soldier. At times he struggles with the idea of necessity, with the principle of harm inflicted now to prevent it in an abstract future he can only hope will come about. Ultimately, though, the cycles of self-revulsion he goes through on some bad days are pointless. Unlike a human, he literally can’t forget what drove him to become a Black Swimmer, and while he’s visited the Sin-Eaters to soften the worst of his battle-memories, he’s never touched the intensity of that first image.

The self-conflict of his duties means, though, that when he does act violently, it’s brutal and thorough. The Liir simply aren’t psychologically built to handle the kinds of things that he’s gone through, and there’s a vicious degree of self-justification that he’s built up around it: if violence is necessary, there’s little difference between a clean death and a messy one, and surrender, honor, and restraint are irrelevant concepts.

When he has a chance to be something other than a soldier, though, Nimuwiil can be near-desperate for ways to make up for the pain he’s inflicted on the universe. Among any of his own people but the Black Swimmers, he would be a pariah—he could never find acceptance or friendship, not with the memories he bears. Among other races, it’s a different story: very few have psychic abilities, and even fewer of those have the kind of receptive empathy that all Liir share. Because of this, though his power and experiences can make him seem like a wise old mentor type at first, he’s more likely than not to slip into playful or even childish behaviors around humanoids he knows well.

Underneath all else—if one could see past the layers of pain and overcompensation, the slow mental scarring of someone who hates disharmony in the Song of the universe having to kill again and again—Nimuwiil retains the impulsive curiosity of his childhood. It’s been tempered by years of responsibility (and by the age-old “if the fire burns stop touching it” principle), but it’s still enough to make him want to learn new things. He has a particular fascination with complex systems, whether they’re of life, thought, or machinery: to his senses the hum of thought through a bureaucracy is no less concrete than the inner workings of a clockwork machine are.

Where Nimuwiil might stand out most to members of other races, though, are the aspects of him that are not at all human. He might evade questions or give false impressions sometimes, but he never, ever lies directly: it’s simply not a valid concept to him. In the same way, many niceties of humanoid society, even as much as saying “thank you”, are foreign to him. In the culture he knows, a certain degree of generosity, helpfulness, and universal sympathy is simply the default, and any Liir who went without showing them in actions and thought would be seen as severely psychologically damaged at best and psychopathic at worst. Intentional cruelty that a human might look past, like a child’s bullying, would seem bizarre and anathema to him, and corruption or abuse of power even moreso.

Abilities/Powers/Skills:

Liir:

Nimuwiil is a Liir—a member of a race of psychically potent, omnivorous, air-breathing sea-dwellers. They’re like large dolphins or small whales in the early adult stage of life, though Liir never stop growing and the eldest of them can be tens or hundreds of meters long. He is, as one would expect, an excellent swimmer and natural hunter. As a Liir, he also has a few notable mental quirks compared to humans: he never sleeps, has no subconscious mind, and has a perfect memory.

His eyesight is quite poor compared to a human, but his sonar can easily map the area around him and even the insides of creatures or technology. The farthest “shouting distance” of his sonar is about one hundred to two hundred meters (depending on how much interference-noise there is in the environment), beyond which he can only pick up on general details of the landscape.

Psychic:

Like all Liir, Nimuwiil has potent telepathic and telekinetic abilities. At short range, he can do things like literally hate someone to death, cause full-sensory hallucinations, launch small objects at velocities upwards of the speed of sound, telekinetically substitute for an entire machine shop, or induce rapid (if somewhat unsafe) healing with massive forced cell growth. His telepathic abilities can affect almost anything living and organic, even mindless creatures or microscopic ones. (Liir use this ability to substitute for much fine-scale technology, breeding precise strains of bacteria or other microscopic creatures to fit certain duties.) Non-organic beings, though, are only a faint “ghost” to Nimuwiil’s telepathic sense, hard to detect and even harder to actually affect.

The potency of Nimuwiil’s psychic ability drops off with distance. Past a hundred meters or so, he could perform can perform limited and crude telekinetic manipulation or omnidirectional telepathic “broadcasts”. Beyond that—at, say, the sort of ranges involved in a space battle—Nimuwiil can’t really do anything offensive with his psychic abilities, though he might be able to maintain telepathic communication with someone themselves telepathically talented. At interplanetary or farther distances, Nimuwiil’s psychic abilites are of pretty much no use, though he might be able to pick up on a psychic or cosmic sort of signal at such a distance if it was absurdly powerful enough.

Nimuwiil is quite used to being part of an extended telepathic metaconcert used to coordinate ships or entire fleets in battle, and might be able to draw upon his experience to lead such an effort himself, though finding that many telepaths among the 43rd Fleet seems unlikely at best. He doesn’t have the power or experience to apply his telekinetic abilities at a space-combat scale even with the extra help, but he could potentially aid someone else in the effort.

Black Swimmer:

Nimuwiil is a Black Swimmer—his peoples’ equivalent of a soldier, though the concept is also deeply linked to the Liir history of space travel. He’s thoroughly trained in operating and repairing the equipment of his species’ spacecraft, armored suits and other advanced equipment, though much of it has drastic differences from the equipment used by other races (for example, the way said spacecraft are normally filled with liquid). As one would expect, he’s trained to fight and kill, both with his psychic abilities and with a wide variety of personal and ship weapons.

As a Black Swimmer, Nimuwiil also has considerable training in telepathic defenses, and can withstand the feedback effects of his telepathy much better than most Liir (but see Weaknesses, below).

Weaknesses:

Nimuwiil’s telepathy isn’t something that he can just turn off. Though as a Black Swimmer he’s trained to handle psychic trauma much better than most Liir, he can’t just block it out entirely. Because of this, if something painful, cruel, or traumatic happens to an organic creature near him, he feels at least some echo of it, whether it’s active combat or as simple as a child being bullied. If he was caught in the midst of some great massacre or torture of an innocent, he would probably be able to handle himself all right (if perhaps viciously retributive) in the short term, but would probably need some kind of therapy over the longer run (and from someone with telepathic ability or a similar power, as he literally lacks completely the sort of mental compensating methods and unconscious mind humans have).

Special Items:

Nimuwiil has his spacesuit with him (more properly a “landsuit” given its common uses), though in the wake of his arrival it’s been heavily and crudely patched to keep it operational. It acts as a full life support system, supports his bulk out of the water, and the set of mechanical tentacles attached to its sides serve in place of the legs and grasping limbs of terrestrial creatures. The most important aspect of it to him is that it has an oxygenated-liquid breathing system. For one of the Black Swimmers, switching to breathing air again can be somewhat traumatic, as well as having something of a ritual aspect to it.

RP Sample:

test drive: cultural differences (let me know if it’s not enough and I’ll write up something else)