Lafiel Abriel

➺ PLAYER

Name: Stareyes
Age: 31
Preferred Contact Method: beccastareyes @ plurk
Current Characters: Not applicable

➺ CHARACTER

Character Name: Abriel Nei Debrusc Borl Paryun Lafiel (Abriel Lafiel if you want something that fits on a single line)
Character Age: 22

Canon: Banner of the Stars (anime, though setting details may leak in from novels/manga)

Canon Point: post-Banner of the Stars II

History: http://seikai.wikia.com/wiki/Abriel_Lafiel

Personality: Lafiel was raised knowing she was an Abriel, and was thus, potentially a future Empress and definitely her father’s heir. Either way, she would become a person of consequence. We only have Lafiel’s accounts of her first 15 years of life, but she takes clear delight in Jinto Lynn (raised as an outsider to the Abh Empire) not recognizing her and getting a chance to be called by her personal name, rather than Princess/Your Highness, which even peers did, even in the Abh military academies, where (nominally) all genetic-Abh cadets are assumed to be equal.

Despite clearly enjoying the fact Jinto was the first person she met, outside of her family and her genetic mother, who didn’t see her as her title first, and slowly warming up to her first crew, Lafiel does have a major problem not being an Officer and a Princess in public. She keeps a tight leash on her emotions, with the exception of those related to anger. In particular, it’s mentioned that Lafiel feels she can’t cry in public, even for those she cares about, because a (future) Empress shouldn’t show favoritism to one subject: either she cries for all Abh citizens, or she cries for none.

Lafiel is also a very proud person. She's generally confident, occasionally to the point of impulsiveness, and will fake confidence when she does get worried. She also has a bit of trouble taking being teased, or looking silly. Her father once joked that Lafiel’s other gene-donor was the family cat (which she resents him for a decade later; Lafiel didn’t inherit her father’s sense of humor), and in some way her prickliness is a bit feline: she has to like you a lot to let herself tolerate being ‘weak’ or embarrassed around you. This can even be as simple as showing up in disguise as an unmodified human (in a dress and hat and with dyed hair); she was annoyed at Jinto for picking it out, but accepted that it was the best plan they had after crashing on an occupied planet where her uniform and genetic traits marked her as an enemy. She never quite forgave being rescued in that get-up, or that the admiral of the fleet that re-took the planet found it to be the funniest thing ever.

Lafiel also can and does hold a grudge and doesn't mind being lethal about it if she feels like the offense calls for that response. Given that the Abh generally assume anything severe enough to be a crime is severe enough that you are wasting oxygen and food by continuing to live, this can discomfort non-Abh. An example is that, when she was tasked to escort Jinto to the capital to join the Abh military, after the warship sent to do the task originally was attacked, she was held hostage by the Baron Febdash, who had a number of motivations that were focused by the belief that Lafiel’s shuttle leaving his territory would draw fire to him, and that a lone Abh and her genetic-lander passenger couldn’t do anything. Lafiel took the disruption of her mission seriously enough that she was willing to kill the baron to get him to let her go, though it seems likely that if she had a choice between killing him and completing her mission, she would have chosen duty (at least for the moment; it seems unlikely she’d let the matter drop entirely).

This kind of shows, she can be vengeful and generally scary if you touch her ‘precious people’. She loves the Empire in the general, but her family in specific and her crew, and Jinto (who became her Supply Officer). When Jinto was used by a hostage in a messy situation where the Abh had conquered another government’s prison planet, Jinto was taken hostage by one faction. Lafiel noted that, should Jinto be killed, she would make a point of not killing the leader of the faction, but making him wish that she had, as past generations of her family had done to their enemies.

Lafiel, at some level, has internalized the idea that your enemies need to fear you. She’s less good at the fact her allies want to love her. Lafiel’s crew finds Lafiel’s seriousness a bit off-putting, and Jinto had to serve as a sort of go-between early in her tenure as captain. Lafiel cares for all her people, but has trouble showing it without breaking the barrier of her rank, both military and social. (And, really, Lafiel’s social skills are not particularly good, even by Abh standards, though she is improving.)

If you do get into Lafiel's good graces, expect some teasing and some prickliness, but a lot of genuine warmth and loyalty. While she has enough of duty drummed into her that she's not prone to needless self-sacrifice, she will pull every string and push every limit she has to help someone she cares about. She might be awkward, but she’s learning and she genuinely does care.

Lafiel took quite well to the military; she despises servility, and isn't terribly fond of her duties as princess. She's far more comfortable with the hierarchy of the military (where officers are required to only be insane in ways that do not interfere with their duties) than the nobility. She also finds diplomacy tiresome and generally will start cutting people off or bossing them around when pressed. She's capable of making tough decisions about her subordinates, and even her loved ones, even if the decisions tear her heart out: during the aforementioned hostage situation, an enemy fleet approached and Lafiel was required to leave the system and escort the refugees to safety, rather than be an obvious target (a convoy of civilian Abh ships and a single patrol ship would have been shot down). She knew that there was a good chance Jinto would be dead or taken prisoner if found by enemy soldiers, but thousands of lives (and the 28 other soldiers on her ship) would be lost if she delayed. (It was then that the comment about how Lafiel, like all her family, cries to herself; she can’t afford to show favorites, but she can mourn people.)

Power & Abilities: Lafiel is a typical Abh. Her ancestors were genetically engineered for long-duration spaceflight before comforts like modern antigravity were developed. She is acceleration/gravity tolerant (Abh ships are kept at about 0.5 of Earth’s gravity, but Lafiel can take accelerations far better than a lander (unmodified human) raised on an Earthlike planet), and can spend long periods in freefall without muscle/bone loss. She rarely get motion-sick and it would take a degree of motion that would reduce an unmodified human to dry heaves to shake her stomach.

Abh children also learn how to account for all sorts of motion (in freefall, in different gravity, in rotating frames) the same way that lander children learn how to crawl, walk, run, play ball and do other physical activities, and Lafiel is a prodigy when it comes to this. They are aided by the Abh spacio-sensory organ, which looks like a third eye in the middle of their forehead. This gives the Abh incredible peripheral vision (augmented by the tiara-like headpieces they wear, can be up to a full view of their surroundings). Abh ships even include interfaces for this organ, so the pilot or gunnery officer will sense the view around her ship, rather than relying on a screen. This does give a slight weakness in that the Abh skull has an extra opening in the forehead to accommodate the nerves going from the spacio-sensory organ to the brain, making head wounds more severe and more likely to be lethal.

Lafiel is resistant to many toxins, including alcohol, and in generally good health. Abh typically live to be around 200-250, and could live longer if they hadn’t chosen to have ‘vital function of the body shut down’ be one of the first signs of old age. Abh never appear older than about 25 by unmodified human standards; Lafiel still looks like an older teen, and will probably not approach ‘mid twenties’ in appearance for another decade or two.

Lafiel is the captain of a small (30-person) warship in her setting. So, in addition to being trained as a pilot and comfortable with ship-to-ship combat, she has a basic understanding of most Abh technology (aka she shouldn’t be sent out to fix anything alone, but can follow instructions from an engineer). She also has some tactical skill, though her practical skill is on the terms of small groups and ship-to-ship. She hasn’t had a chance to command fleets into battle yet, but has studied the theory.

Lafiel has done a lot of diplomacy, and is… satisfactory at it, if you allow for someone who doesn’t like it and wishes she were commanding a ship instead. So, she’s better at situations where threats work, or where they just need someone high-ranked enough to accept a standard surrender or treaty. It doesn’t hurt that, given both her career and her friendship with Jinto Lynn, Lafiel is probably quite knowledgeable about other cultures for a young Abh military officer. She still has remarkable gaps in her knowledge, but she knows that she has gaps. She’d probably never fully pass as having grown up on a planet, though, given those remarkable gaps and simply the fact that all of her reflexes are wrong. (But she may be able to pass as someone other than an Abh, if she has a disguise.)

Inventory: Lafiel has her alpha, a tiara-shaped device that she wears on her forehead. In some ways, an alpha is akin to a pair of eyeglasses: Lafiel will take it off to sleep and to bathe and no other time.

It augments her spacio-sensory organ. It does seem to augment this sense on its own, particularly to let her see all around her. But the main function is as an interface between an Abh pilot (or gunner) and a ship: Abh are trained to pilot using the ship’s sensors as their own sense of what’s going on, to the point that Lafiel doesn’t even think about the steps: the ship is an extension of her body.

Moreover, even civilian Abh (including those Abh who are not genetically-Abh and for whom am alpha is entirely cosmetic) wear an alpha. On some level, it’s just a part of being fully dressed in Abh society.

Game Plan: Given the Abh Empire’s history, Lafiel’s natural inclinations make her think the Insurgents are idiots. She will not mince words about this. . The Abh’s creation as slaves and their early reliance on a small, interdependent group with a shared goal meant that Abh culture retains some interdependent roots. However, the same culture also focuses on keeping the Abh as a whole independent.

You can see that in how the Abh administer planets they conquer (or who join the Empire): the standard procedure is to just take over all off-planet travel (though some lee-way is granted for travel within a planetary system) and put in the infrastructure for defense and recruiting and trade, and otherwise not care about what the territorial citizens (people who have their citizenship through a Abh-controlled planet, not citizens of the Empire itself) do. On the other hand, by convention, the Abh noble who controls a system can make the rules for the territorial citizens: the reason that most systems are left alone is because most Abh nobles don’t care about planets as long as their people stay there. This can be both good (Samson mentions that his planet chose the join the Abh Empire, rather than another superpower, because the Abh were the least likely to impose their culture on the planet as a whole) and bad (Lafiel once had to take refuge in the barony of a baron who took out his inferiority complex on his vassals: if he hadn’t tried to use her as a hostage, there would have been little she could do).

That above paragraph can be summarized in that Lafiel fundamentally will not understand the Insurgents’ goals, especially when it comes to space. Space is the sort of place that can only be survivable in a group where everyone has a role and knows how to do their job. While one could probably run a ship based on ties of friendship or kinship and loyalty, anything larger needs a bigger uniting principle. At best, she might understand a group wanting to avoid larger ties, as that echos her own history lessons, but hyper-individualism is not something Lafiel is used to.

However, Lafiel’s loyalties are to the Humankind Abh Empire first and foremost. With mod discussion, I’m allowing that she was sent here under orders from the Abh military, in exchange for something for the war effort, so that means she will be using her talents as an Asset (albeit resentful that she does have overrides in place to enforce her loyalty). However, she will be gathering information for the Abh to bring home. Given Lafiel’s personality, this probably will not be terribly subtle (she’ll be trying). And the instant she thinks the Empire is a threat to the Abh Empire, Lafiel will switch sides to the Insurgents, with the understanding that her goals are to prevent whatever threat the Empire are to the Abh, and their alliance goes that far and no farther.

She still will make it clear she thinks Insurgent principles are stupid and that most natives are better off with the Empire.

➺ LINK TO SAMPLES

http://liberameme.dreamwidth.org/262.html?thread=100870#cmt100870

May we use your application as an example if it's accepted? Sure!

So, alternate universe for solaris_spectacle, a Battletech AU.

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CHARACTER INFO
Name: Abriel Nei Debrusc Borl Paryun Lafiel (Abriel Lafiel if you want something that fits on a single line)
Gender: Female
Source: Crest/Banner of the Stars
Canon point: After Banner of the Stars II.
Age: 23
Colour: #0b90ce
Chumhandle: augustLazuli

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